Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

253. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

262. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

265. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

273. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

278. “Simone de Beauvoir was of the opinion that if, at menopause, a woman gives her “consent” to growing older, she is changed into a “different being,” one who is more herself, one who is complete.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

282. “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

283. “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

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

— 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. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

290. “I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they’re capable of. At forty-two I’d never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem – my chronic inability to astonish myself.”

— 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. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

295. “I hope for everything.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

296. “He’s over your head!” He was, but naturally I’d flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

297. “How often do we do that, he wondered – look at someone and fail to see what’s really there?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

298. “Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

299. “Mauma came down with a limp. When she was in her room or in the kitchen house for meals, she didn’t have any trouble, but the minute she stepped in the yard, she dragged her leg like it was a dead log.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

300. “The most wounded thing in us always finds a way.”

— Sue Monk Kidd