Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Don’t look away. Terrible things will happen now. Unbearable things. Bear it anyway.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

152. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

155. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

171. “When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

172. “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

173. “I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

175. “Regrets don’t help anything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

186. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

197. “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

198. “A Divine Feminine symbol acts to deconstruct patriarchy, which is one of the reasons there’s so much resistance, even hysteria, surrounding the idea of Goddess. The idea of Goddess is so powerfully “other,” so vividly female, it comes like a crowbar shattering the lock patriarchy holds on divine imagery.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

199. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd