Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “She liked to tell everyone that women make the best beekeepers, ’cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

102. “If you must err, do so on the side of audacity. That was the little slogan I’d devised for myself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

103. “There’s a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of ‘soul force’ – something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you identify your inner genius, you will be able to take action, whether it’s writing a check or digging a well.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

104. “This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

105. “I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

106. “Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

107. “Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

108. “When I looked up through the web of trees, the night sky fell over me, and for a moment, I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

109. “You are my everlasting home. Don’t you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

110. “Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

111. “When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

112. “I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone’s joy seemed to double it?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

113. “I knew then that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how many jars of honey you threw, no matter how much you thought you could leave your mother behind, she would never disappear from the tender places in you.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

114. “I wished she’d been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don’t give up their children.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

115. “To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth inevitably occurs.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

116. “The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

117. “Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn’t help but envy the way a good storm got everyone’s attention.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

118. “My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment. The sorrow of it had faded, but regret remained, and I’d taken to wondering if the Fates might be kinder to a different girl.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

119. “Divine feminine imagery opens up the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth becomes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

120. “Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That’s what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

121. “Our earlier lives aren’t wrong, they are just pre-construction. Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that’s good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

122. “Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

123. “Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

124. “I missed Rosaleen’s snoring the way you’d miss the sound of the ocean waves after you’ve gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn’t realize how it had comforted me. Quiteness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

125. “My mother’s life was way too heavy for me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

126. “When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

127. “Cello music swelled out from the house, rising higher and higher until it lifted off the earth, sailing toward Venus.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

128. “There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, ‘My soul is my own,’ and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

129. “You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

130. “I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

131. “Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

132. “The time to assert one’s right is when it’s denied!”

— Sue Monk Kidd

133. “He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

134. “You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair...”

— Sue Monk Kidd

135. “I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

136. “Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn’t stick with your original idea of paradise? People’s lives were a mess.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

137. “I’m tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I’m just going to lay it down now. It’s my time to die, and it’s your time to live. Don’t mess it up.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

138. “Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one’s religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

139. “In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that’s just my opinion.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

140. “It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

141. “We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

142. “I asked myself, How many times have I denied my innermost wisdom and silenced this voice? How many times can a woman betray her sou before it gives up and ceases calling to her at all?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

143. “I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

144. “Where had I been that I didn’t know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and remind you who you could be with a little work.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

145. “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

146. “Return to your longing. It will teach you everything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

147. “For always, always, we are waking up and then waking up some more.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

148. “This Mary I’m talking about sits in your heart all day long, saying, “Lily, you are my everlasting home. Don’t you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

149. “People in general would rather die than forgive. It’s THAT hard. If God said in plain language. “I’m giving you a choice, forgive or die,” a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

150. “Every girl comes into the world with varying degrees of ambition,” she said, “even if it’s only the hope of not belonging body and soul to her husband.”

— Sue Monk Kidd