Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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. “You said you’re not like other men. Well, I’m not like other women-you’ve said so yourself. I have ambitions as men do. I’m racked with longings. I’m selfish and willful and sometimes deceitful. I rebel. I’m easy to anger. I doubt the ways of God. I’m an outsider everywhere I go. People look on me with derision. And you would still have me?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

354. “It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn’t contentment, but survival.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

355. “Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

356. “I’d thought of my aunt as invincible, impervious – someone assailed by life, but somehow unmaimed by it – but I saw her suddenly as a person of flaws and bruises like myself. There was an odd relief in it.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

357. “My own largeness has been to bless yours.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

358. “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

359. “He will use the word “love,” and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything. A person shouldn’t look too far down her nose at absurdities. Look at me. I dived into one absurd thing after another, and here I am in the pink house. I wake up to wonder everyday.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

360. “I laid my palm on the second square – the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn. xvii.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

366. “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

367. “We make our moments, Ana, or we do not.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

368. “Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

369. “I think for you, too, God cannot be contained.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

376. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “A More Resourceful Reprimand.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

385. “The moon was round and white, sitting small at the top of the sky. It seemed the right size to sit in the bowl on the bullet mold. That was what I wished. I wished for the moon instead of lead.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

386. “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

387. “A man’s holy of holies contains God’s laws, but inside women there are only longings.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

388. “You know, she’s really just a figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. 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

389. “August said, “You know what? You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

390. “I spoke the truth to my husband, but not all the truth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

391. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

393. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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