Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Her words infuriated me. I wondered for a moment if holding my tongue would help my cause with Mother. Was it ever right to sacrifice one’s truth for expedience? Mother would do what she would do, wouldn’t she? I wondered how it was possible I’d found my words out there in the world, but could lose them in the house where I was born.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

452. “Glancing behind me, I saw that the few who’d remained to walk with him were women. Where were these disciples of his? The fishermen? The men? Were women the only ones with hearts large enough to hold such anguish?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

453. “Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

454. “Life had taken a mallet to me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

455. “Judas means to have his revolution, Ana. If Jesus doesn’t bring it about peaceably, Judas means to ignite it by force. The surest way to incite the masses is for the Romans to execute their Messiah.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

456. “What a shitbucket.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

457. “This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

458. “I realized that the heart of religion was setting up an honest dialogue with the uniqueness of one’s soul and finding a deeply personal relationship with God, the inner Voice, the inner Music that plays in you as it does in no one else.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

459. “It was something of a wonder to discover that the human Jesus has so many different faces and that people, even historical Jesus scholars, tend to view him through the lens of their own needs and proclivities. For some he’s a political activist. For others, a miracle worker. He’s viewed as rabbi, social prophet, religious reformer, wisdom teacher, nonviolent revolutionary, philosopher, feminist, apocalyptic preacher, and on and on.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

460. “I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I’d once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

461. “She has been the keeper of home for me, and I have been the keeper of journey for her. And now we look for the lost portion in each other.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

462. “We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

463. “No one had avenged the unnamed concubine. Jacob did not seek vengeance on Shechem. King David did not punish his son.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

464. “But yours is the God of the Jews,” Diodora said. “I know nothing of him. It’s Isis I serve.” “We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we’ll find the God that exists behind them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

465. “In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

466. “The sun’s pink fingers were still wrapped around the clouds.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

467. “I wanted it to suggest how important it is to take the broken, painful, and discarded fragments of our lives and piece them into something whole. There can be healing, and power, too, in giving expression to what’s inside of us, in having our voices heard and our pain witnessed. As writer Isak Dinesen put it, “All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

468. “Every time it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn’t know was there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one who’d once filled it up. I didn’t stumble into this place much anymore, but when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

469. “Uhhh yea, just did. 30 years ago. You.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

470. “It’s not meant to be a factual story, but it’s still true.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

471. “Meekness. It isn’t meekness I need, it’s anger.” I’d not forgotten this. I knelt beside my friend.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

472. “That’s when I got true religion. I didn’t know to call it religion back then, didn’t know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonged to me. I would say, that’s my water out there.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

473. “But you can’t talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you’re not.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

474. “I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

475. “May this severing not cut us apart, but bind us together.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

476. “That is where God was to be found. Not in the erasing of the experience, but in the embracing of it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

477. “The main thing is to stop struggling and nourish yourself. When you nourish yourself, your creative energy is renewed. You are able to pick up your lyre again and sing.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

478. “There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there’s a greater good here that must be protected.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

479. “Plus, there were the children to consider. They were, for me, the biggest concern of all... But what if I challenged the institution? Not setting the “proper and accepted” religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn’t the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting the circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

480. “There was so much in the world to be had and not had.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

481. “We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mama had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing down your neck.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

482. “But he was Jesus, and I was Ana. I wasn’t ready to let go of my animosity toward Judas. I would do so in time, but right now it saved me. It left less room inside for pain.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

483. “The vision was a promise, was it not, that the light in me would not be extinguished. The largeness in me would not shrink away. I would yet become visible in this world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

484. “He sensed my fear, and wishing to break its spell, he said, “Consider the lilies of the field. They are not anxious, yet God takes care of them. How much more will he take care of you?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

485. “They are condemned as impure, but God is love. He would not be so cruel as to condemn them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

486. “The words opened a raw, furious place in me. She wanted me to write? My daughter was dead. My writing was dead, too. One day had never come. I was the shattered pieces on the floor. Life had taken a mallet to me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

487. “Forming a critique is essential to the birth and development of a spiritual feminist consciousness. Until a woman is willing to set aside her unquestioned loyalty and look critically at the tradition and convention of her faith, her awakening will never fully emerge. The extent of her healing, autonomy, and power is related to the depth of the critique she is able to integrate into her life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

488. “It was close to the end of Shebat, when the almond trees blossomed. The wakeful tree, we called it. Midway down the hill, I smelled its rich brown scent, and winding farther, I came upon the tree itself, its canopy lush with white flowers.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

489. “It has been a day of suffering for you,” he said, and the words opened a ravine of sadness in me. My eyes glazed, a sob creeping up the back of my throat.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

490. “I would be a chronicler of lost stories.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

491. “Self-questioning is a far more essential ingredient in life than I ever supposed. It’s the water that keeps the modeling clay of our life from hardening into something forever rigid and unchanging.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

492. “She’s the mother of thousands.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

493. “Sometimes I was so busy being tuned in to outside ideas, expectations, and demands, I failed to hear the unique music in my soul.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

494. “Well, that’s not what the Bible preaches. It says if you know the truth, it’ll set you free.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

495. “Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d’art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

496. “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

497. “By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

498. “She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow’s cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her “polite education for the female mind,” which was composed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

499. “Remembering Enheduanna, who signed her name to her writing, I reopened the books and signed mine: Ana. Not Ana, daughter of Matthias, or Ana, wife of Jesus. Just Ana.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

500. “Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard.”

— Sue Monk Kidd