Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Were all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

152. “He will use the word “love”, and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

154. “Why didn’t I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

155. “Grandmotherhood initiated me into a world of play, where all things became fresh, alive, and honest again through my grandchildren’s eyes. Mostly, it retaught me love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

156. “She didn’t say, Come on now, stop your crying, everything’s going to be okay, which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, ‘It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.’ So I did. With my mouth pressed against her dress, it seemed like I drew up my whole lifeload of pain and hurled it into her breast, heaved it with the force of my mouth, and she didn’t flinch.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

157. “Regrets don’t help anything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

158. “Nina was one wing, I was another – Sarah Grimke.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

159. “I know you’ve run away – everybody gets the urge to do that some time – but sooner or later you’ll want to go home.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

160. “No assurance, no platitude, no promise of God’s mercy. Just a stark reminder that death was part of life. She offered me nothing but a way to accept whatever came-Let life be life. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

161. “Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don’t grieve?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

162. “I grew up in the American South and came of age in the 1960s, an incredibly turbulent time. It was as if the seams of American life were being ripped apart with riots and protests.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

163. “I will meet you in the place called Deathless, I whispered.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

164. “A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

165. “Your moment will come, and when it does, you must seize it with all the bravery you can find.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

166. “I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

167. “The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that – an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

168. “That was the way mauma had lived her whole life. She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you’re gon be, the one that’s fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

169. “Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I’d lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn’t understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

170. “Whatever else you do, listen to your Deepest Self. Love Her and be true to Her, speak Her truth, always.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

171. “I’d heard August say more than once, “If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.” T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

172. “For me, creativity is essentially a spiritual experience, a conversation between my soul and me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

173. “Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

174. “I want to tell you I’m strong and resolute, but in truth, I feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if he has died, and I suppose in some way it’s true. I’m left with nothing but this strange beating in my heart that tells me I’m meant to do something in this world. I cannot apologize for it, or for loving this small beating as much as him.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

175. “To condemn slavery was one thing – that I could do in my own individual heart – but female ministers!”

— Sue Monk Kidd

176. “Sometimes, in order to say yes to what matters most, I must say no to good things.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

177. “Don’t look away. Terrible things will happen now. Unbearable things. Bear it anyway.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

178. “The female soul is no small thing. Neither is a woman’s right to define the sacred from a woman’s perspective.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

179. “Laughter is soul making, too. No matter how dark and serious a crisis seems, I shouldn’t abandon my joy.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

180. “In a way, humans are not made of skin and bones as such, as we’re made of stories.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

181. “Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They’d had no idea what they were talking about. He’d cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

182. “Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

183. “Their laughter would ring out abruptly, a sound Mother welcomed. “Our slaves are happy,” she would boast. It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

184. “People who think dying is the is the worst thing don’t know a thing about life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

185. “Nobody should go through life without falling in love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

186. “Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

187. “She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

188. “Solitude is a time for “God and God alone.” Who knows what can happpen when we focus only on God. In solitude, we sense our deep oneness with God and keep company with Him. Solitude is breaking through my isolation into sharing and being in touch with my Creator. In fact, we can begin to heal our loneliness by transforming it into solitude.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

189. “To constantly relive the past is to miss out on the present.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

190. “I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

191. “I just mean that everything eventually ends. The two suns are always rising somewhere. That’s part of life. Something ends and then something else will begin.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

192. “The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

193. “If you think the country is quiet, you’ve never lived in it. Tree frogs alone make you wish for earplugs.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

194. “Do not leave it to fate. You must be the one who does the resurrecting.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

195. “I hadn’t been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called ‘bee yard etiquette’. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don’t be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don’t be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don’t swat. Don’t even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee’s temper. Act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

196. “I couldn’t be angered by her deceit-it didn’t come from treachery. We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

197. “Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

198. “The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of unifying one’s heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

199. “June always said that most people bit off more than they could chew, but August chewed more than she bit off.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

200. “Our experience of our body has been immersed in shame. Waking to the sacredness of the female body will cause a woman to “enter into” her body in a new way, be at home in it, honor it, nurture it, listen to it, delight in its sensual music. She will experience her female flesh as beautiful and holy, as a vessel of the sacred. She will live from her gut and feet and hands and instincts and not entirely in her head.”

— Sue Monk Kidd