Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “After a while, I went down to the cellar. When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

402. “A More Resourceful Reprimand.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

403. “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

404. “Aunt-Sister would’ve said, ‘Let her go, it’s past the time,’ but I wanted the pain of mauma’s face and hands more than the peace of being without them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

405. “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

406. “The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

407. “The birth of a daughter is a loss. Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

408. “The need to share what we experience, to be listened to, to have what is going on inside us matter to the person we are married to, to engage in a two-way dialogue, is the cry of one soul yearning to meet another.”5.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

414. “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

415. “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

416. “Leaning back on my elbows, I slid down till the water sealed over my head. I held my breath and listened to the scratch of river against my ears, sinking as far as I could into that shimmering, dark world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

417. “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

418. “A marriage or any relationship between partners is meant to be created and then re-created. It is an edifice a couple builds until the day the edifice can no longer hold them and they must bring it down and start again from scratch. And without any of the old assumptions. It’s exactly like Carolyn Heilbrun says, all good marriages are remarriages.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

419. “The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

420. “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

421. “There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat. They would be abreast of news that would incite them in ways we could not control. Yes, it’s unfair to deprive them, but there’s a greater good here that must be protected.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

422. “One of nature’s most healing gifts to us, though, is its reminder to us to stay grounded and connected to the natural cycles of life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

423. “The words I wrote would not be read by unborn eyes. I would become the forgotten wife of a horrid little man lusting for a son.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

424. “He turned on his side to face me and I felt that he saw deep inside me. He said, “I bless the largeness in you, Ana.” “And I bless yours,” I told him. Then he rose and, opening the door, stared toward the valley with the same deep, pure gaze he’d cast on me. I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right. Parting was fully upon us now.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

425. “But you can’t talk yourself out of anger. Either you are angry or you’re not.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

426. “Uncovering this need has been like finding an empty room in the center of my house, one I didn’t know was there, one I couldn’t pass without feeling its vacuity and wondering how it should be filled. I know I came to Greece in part to try and fill this vacancy in myself. I just didn’t think it would have anything to do with Mary.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

427. “I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

428. “May this severing not cut us apart, but bind us together.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

429. “I will not forget what Jesus said to me when I finished my song. He said, ‘Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

430. “I, Haran ben Philip Levias, faithful patron of the Therapeutae for two decades, write to Skepsis, the community’s esteemed leader, and ask that my sister and niece, who are presently under the Therapeutae’s guardianship, be relinquished into my care, where they will be accorded every concern and favor. By delivering them to the men who encamp nearby, the Therapeutae will continue to enjoy my loyal generosity.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

431. “Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself. There in the rootbed of fertility, World without end, as the legend tells it. Under the words you are my silence.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

432. “Her words infuriated me. I wondered for a moment if holding my tongue would help my cause with Mother. Was it ever right to sacrifice one’s truth for expedience? Mother would do what she would do, wouldn’t she? I wondered how it was possible I’d found my words out there in the world, but could lose them in the house where I was born.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

433. “It’s not meant to be a factual story, but it’s still true.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

434. “Meekness. It isn’t meekness I need, it’s anger.” I’d not forgotten this. I knelt beside my friend.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

435. “Once you wake up, can you wake up any more?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

436. “That there was also largeness in you. I knew you possessed a generosity of abilities that comes only rarely into the world. You knew it, too, for you wrote of it in your bowl. But we all have some largeness in us, don’t we, Ana?” “What are you saying, Aunt?” “What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn’t the largeness in you that matters most, it’s your passion to bring it forth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

437. “Once the words are out there, they start to live and breathe in unpredictable ways.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

438. “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.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

439. “She’d been boiled down to a good, strong broth. Her hair was loose, dangling along the sides.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

440. “What I’d loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

441. “My first and only memory of my mother was the day she died.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

442. “But yours is the God of the Jews,” Diodora said. “I know nothing of him. It’s Isis I serve.” “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

443. “We might stay here the rest of our lives with the sky slammed shut, but mama had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing down your neck.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

444. “A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

445. “The skies were bright cerulean, teeming with ferocious winds, spilling mallards and fat wood drakes from the clouds.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

446. “Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore we must be love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

447. “And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that’s Mary, too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that’s the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love – but to persist in love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

448. “But he was Jesus, and I was Ana. I wasn’t ready to let go of my animosity toward Judas. I would do so in time, but right now it saved me. It left less room inside for pain.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

449. “Night after night, I endured these grand affairs alone, revolted by what objets d’art we were and contemptuous of how hollow society had turned out to be, and yet inexplicably, I was filled with a yearning to be one of them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

450. “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth.”

— Sue Monk Kidd