Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Novels attempt to render human experience; that’s really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

253. “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

254. “Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn’t have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I’d lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

255. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “The whole problem with people is they don’t know what matters and what doesn’t.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

261. “I heard mauma say, “I don’t spec to get free. The only way I’m getting free is for you to get free.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

262. “It was unthinkable. Unmarried daughters didn’t go off to live unprotected on their own in a foreign place. They lived at home with their mothers, and when there was no mother, with their sisters, and when there were no sisters, with their brothers.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

263. “I am the coming together and the falling apart. I am the enduring and the disintegration...”

— Sue Monk Kidd

264. “You’re looking for a reason,” she said. “And that doesn’t help. It doesn’t change the present.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

265. “The aim of the novelist is not only to hold up a mirror to the world, but to imagine what’s possible.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “I’d forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startle birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

270. “There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn’t have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. 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 me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

271. “Which end of the needle are you going to be- the side held by string or the point that pierces the cloth?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

272. “I eventually found that the soul is more than an immortal commodity to win and save. It is the repository of the inner divine, the truest part of us.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

273. “We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we’ll find the God that exists behind them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

275. “In the end the mermaids did not save him. But I wonder if perhaps they saved me. I know this much: the mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

276. “If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

277. “I wondered what it was like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in the darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

278. “What matters is giving over to what you love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

279. “God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

280. “If you don’t know where your’re going, you should know where you came from.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

281. “I hope for everything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

282. “It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

283. “But we all have some largeness in us, don’t we, Ana?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

284. “I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

285. “I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

286. “It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

287. “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.” Such a notion made it virtually impossible to enjoy life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

288. “She laid the book down and came where I was standing by the chimney place and put her arms round me. It was hard to know where things stood. People say love gets fouled by a difference big as ours. I didn’t know for sure whether Miss Sarah’s feelings came from love or guilt. I didn’t know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. 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

289. “I didn’t see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

290. “Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people’s hearts.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

291. “It only meant that my natural inclination was to draw my “energy” from within instead of seeking it outside myself, plus my mom was an introvcert, and so were a lot of normal people. The problem was I was shy on top of that. And we all know how the world loves a shy introvert.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

292. “All this love coming to me. I didn’t know what to do with it. I wanted to say, I love you, too. I love you all. The feeling rose up in me like a column of wind, but when it got to my mouth, it had no voice, no words. Just a lot of air and longing.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

293. “For years I’d written down my dreams, believing, as I still do, that one of the purest sources of knowledge about our lives comes from the symbols and images deep within.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

294. “Your moment will come because you’ll make it come.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

295. “The kjerringsleppet were a marvelous image for the empowered self. A “woman on the loose” is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of the trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now. And I am not going away. The motto that the women on the loose adopted is: “To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited.” That’s not a half-bad motto.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

296. “Just to be is holy, just to live is a gift.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

297. “He’d cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he’d refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

298. “Squeezing it in my palm, I prayed, Please, God, let this seed you planted in me bear fruit.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

299. “Pay them no mind and turn the other cheek. Their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

300. “I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.”

— Sue Monk Kidd