Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round. I’d dismissed the words – what could she know of it? But I saw.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

353. “There’s a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

354. “The human soul needs a divine mother, a feminine aspect to balance out the masculinity of God, and yes, Mary had carried it off the best she could.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

355. “Ah, but never underestimate the power of a dismissed dream. I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

356. “He gazed at me with kindness and pity. “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

357. “Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

358. “Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

359. “Bees swarm before death. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about this one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

360. “I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

361. “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

362. “What is bound will be unbound. What is cast down will be lifted up. That is the promise of Our Lady.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

363. “You’ve been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it’s time to die, go ahead and die, and when it’s time to live, live. Don’t sort-of-maybe live, but live like you’re going all out, like you’re not afraid.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

364. “It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

365. “To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

366. “The way to find your thread again is to be still and remember who you are, to listen to your heart, your inner wisdom, as deeply as you can and then give yourself permission to follow it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

367. “What else do you love, Lily?” No one had ever asked me this before. What did I love?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

368. “It was true I no longer believed in the God of rescue, only the God of presence, but I believed in Sophia, who whispered bravery and wisdom in my ear day and night, if I would only listen, and I tried now to do that, to listen.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

369. “The door closed. So quiet it amounted to nothing but a snap of air, and that was the strangeness of it, how a small sound like that could fall across the whole world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

370. “I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don’t choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

371. “The moment she lifted me, I was wrapped in her smell. The scent got laid down in me in a permanent way and had all the precision of cinnamon.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

372. “The whole fabric of honey bee society depends on communication – on an innate ability to send and receive messages, to encode and decode information.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

373. “All shall be well,” Yaltha had told me, and when I’d recoiled at how trite and superficial that sounded, she’d said, “I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There’s a place in you that is inviolate. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

374. “Knock upon yourself as on a door, and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk on that road, you cannot get lost, and what you open for yourself will open. GOSPEL OF THOMAS.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

375. “Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

376. “If Jacob’s ladder reached all the way to heaven, so, too, did ours.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

377. “Our choice, as Florence Nightingale put it, is between pain and paralysis. A hard one. But it’s only when we are willing to see the truth about our lives as women, however painful that truth might be, that we enter the portal of the journey.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

378. “Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.”21.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

379. “Did you know there are 32 names for love in one of the Eskimo language? And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn’t that a shame we don’t have more ways to say it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

380. “To create newness you have to cover the soul and let grace rise.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

381. “I couldn’t help but envy the way a good storm got everyone’s attention.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

382. “Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

383. “In writing The Invention of Wings, I was inspired by the words of Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: “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

384. “Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

385. “Later, I lay awake listening to him sleep, the soft clouds of his breath filling the room. I couldn’t close my eyes for happiness. It sprouted in me like a bright green shoot.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

386. “Before October, I would have denied it vehemently, as we are apt to do when something true is unconscious to us.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

387. “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.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

388. “June Singer points out, when a girl is growing up, it is not taken for granted, as it is with boys, that her life and needs will be primary, that she will have access to places of authority and power like her brothers or father. What is taken for granted is that she will find her main source of fulfillment through her husband and family, that she will be secondary to them.35 A.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

389. “I always have cold feet but come on, they won’t stop me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

390. “Perhaps the thing most denied to women is anger. “Forbidden anger, women could find no voice in which publicly to complain; they took refuge in depression,” writes Carolyn Heilbrun. Her words came true for me. Without the ability to allow or the means to adequately express the anger, I began to slide into periods of depression.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

391. “If I ever managed to get to heaven after everything I’d done, I hoped I would get just a few minutes for a private conference with God. I wanted to say, 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

392. “The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

393. “I am the coming together and the falling apart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

394. “Yaltha is summed up in these two lines from the novel: “Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders. She trespassed everywhere.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

395. “July 1, 1964, I lay in bed, waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations. “Bees swarm before death,” she’d said.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

396. “The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

397. “I’ll take nine steps and look up. Whatever my eyes light on, that’s my sign. I saw a crop duster plunging his little plane over a field of growing things, behind him a cloud of pesticides parachuting out. I couldn’t decide what part of the scene I represented: the plants about to be rescued from the bugs or the bugs about to be murdered by the spray. There was an off chance I was really the airplane zipping over the earth creating rescue and doom everywhere I went.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

398. “To know exactly where you’re headed may be the best way to go astray. Not all who loiter are lost.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

399. “If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

400. “Everything I did felt heavy and difficult – drying the dishes, kneeling for evening prayers, even pulling down the sheets to get into bed.”

— Sue Monk Kidd