Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

203. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

205. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

220. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

232. “Indeed, love is everything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

233. “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

234. “Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness. Say you break your ankle and don’t feel it hurting till you’ve walked another block.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

235. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

237. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

241. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

250. “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