Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “As an adolescent, I went to charm school, where I learned to pour tea and relate to boys, which, as I recall, meant giving them the pickle jar to unscrew, whether it was too hard for me or not.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

202. “The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, ‘You poor thing. I know how you feel.’ Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that’s just me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

203. “Synchronicities, those times when an outer event resonates mysteriously and powerfully with what’s happening inside, are more numerous during great shifts and upheavals. If we pay attention, if we approach them as symbolic and revelatory, they will often illuminate a way for us.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

204. “He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

205. “For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the pale of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

206. “I believe in the goodness of imagination.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

207. “I fall and there ain’t no wings sprouting off my shoulders.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

208. “We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

209. “I don’t remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

210. “She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they ever would get.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

211. “Sometimes, I experience God like this beautiful nothing’, he said, ‘and it seems then as though the whole point of life is just to rest in it. To contemplate it, and love it, and eventually to disappear into it. And then, other times, it’s just the opposite. God feels like a presence that engorges everything. I come out here and it seems the divine is running rampant. That the marsh, the whole of creation, is some dance God is doing and we’re meant to step into it. That’s all.’” – Whit.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

212. “My mother was a good Catholic – she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary’s in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

213. “I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

214. “Sometimes I didn’t even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I’d have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn’t care.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

215. “Indeed, love is everything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

216. “At that moment she seemed everything I was not, and this came as a small revelation. I had hated in her what I lacked in myself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

217. “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

218. “Life will be life and death will be death.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

219. “I liked the way Walter Cronkite looked, with his black glasses and his voice that knew everything worth knowing. Here was a man who was not against books, that was plain. Take everything T. Ray was not, shape it into a person, and you would get Walter Cronkite.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

220. “You’ll be devastated and grief-stricken, but there’s a place in you that is inviolate-it’s the surest part of you, a piece of Sophia herself. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

221. “From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

222. “They speak of Jesus as having had no wife,” Lavi told me. That was a conundrum I puzzled over for months. Was it because I was absent when he traveled about Galilee during his ministry? Was it because women were so often invisible? Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

223. “Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

224. “It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

225. “All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

226. “When I looked up, Yaltha’s eyes were settled on me. She said, “A man’s holy of holies contains God’s laws, but inside a woman’s there are only longings.” Then she tapped the flat bone over my heart and spoke the charge that caused something to flame up in my chest: “Write what’s inside here, inside your holy of holies.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

227. “It’s part of our overall Body Negation Program.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

228. “It’s always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

229. “So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

230. “All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

231. “I didn’t know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

232. “Mr. Vesey, though, he didn’t like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

233. “His laugh rose and fell and rose again, and I told myself I could love him for that alone.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

234. “Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

235. “You think with your head. You know with your heart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

236. “That was the thing mauma and I loved, our time with the quilts.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

237. “Of all the emotions, Hope was the most mysterious. It grew like the blue lotus, snaking up from muddy hearts, beautiful while it lasted.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

238. “So few people know what they’re capable of.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

239. “I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

240. “The echo of one of God’s deepest truths: delight can emerge from and exist along with our scars.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

241. “I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

242. “I pressed Yaltha to set a course, but she persisted in her waiting, saying if the pot was tended long enough, the answer would bubble to the surface.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

243. “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

244. “Novels attempt to render human experience; that’s really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

245. “Stopping is a spiritual art. It is the refuge where we drink life in.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

246. “To write again felt like a return to myself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

247. “June always said that most people bit off more than they could chew, but August chewed more than she bit off. June loved to tease August about the way she pondered things, how one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most white people would choke on. I wanted to say, ‘Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

248. “If someone should ask me, ‘What does the soul do?’ I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

249. “Is the library all you hoped?” “It’s a holy of holies,” I said. And it was, but I could feel the tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

250. “I feel again the hunger to let go of my striving and find the ability to become content and still, intentionally “superfluous,” as writer Helen M. Luke puts it. I want a refuge from my old conquering self.”

— Sue Monk Kidd