Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

402. “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

403. “Years ago, your father and I adopted this piece of chain as a symbol for our marriage. The two outer links represent each of our lives and the center link, our marriage. It reminds us that we have independent lives, dreams, and journeys, but at the same time, we are joined in a center space where our lives are one. We.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

404. “You don’t have to feel love for her. Only try to act with love.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

405. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

408. “Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. I didn’t know if it was the emptiness, the.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “A More Resourceful Reprimand.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

414. “Solidarity is identifying with one another without feeling like you have to agree on every issue. It’s unity, not uniformity. It’s listening without rushing in to fix the problem. It’s going deeper than typical ways of talking and sharing – going down to the place where souls meet and love comes, where separateness drops away and you know these women because you are these women.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

415. “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.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

420. “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

421. “Choiak, son of Dios and a keeper of camels in the village of Soknopaiou, his wife having died and left him toil and suffering, does hand over his two-year-old daughter, Diodora, to a priest of the Temple of Isis for the sum of 1,400 silver drachmae.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

422. “I would say, I loved her the way you love God, with all my heart and soul and might.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

423. “For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved to in assimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

424. “In Christian language, this is plain, old-fashioned surrender – giving up our conscious will and striving, and yielding instead to the inner kingdom. The soul-work involved in this internal restructuring is, I believe, the deepest meaning of spiritual becoming.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

425. “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

426. “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

427. “It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

428. “Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it’s brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We’re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren’t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

429. “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

430. “The day we gathered our daughter’s bones, the valley was full of wild lilies. Do you remember? You told me to consider the lilies, that God takes care of them and will surely, then, care for us. Consider them now, my love. Consider the lilies.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

431. “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

432. “The life you’re living can be torn apart like Osiris’s and a new one pieced together. Some of you might die and a new self will rise up to take it’s place.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

433. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

436. “There is nothing perfect, there is only life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

437. “In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

438. “When she talks about her feelings, I have to consciously tell myself she wants me to receive them, not fix them.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

439. “The best gift she has given me is the constancy of her belief. Whatever I become, she loves me. To her, I am enough.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Jesus sat down at a discreet distance, cross-legged, facing the cave opening. For a long interval we watched the rain and the wild, untethered sky without speaking. The nearness of him, his breathing, the way everything I felt inhabited me – I found rapture in these things, in this being together in the lonely place, and all around the thundering world.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “To avoid a fear emboldens it,” she said. I said nothing. “All shall be well, child.” I reared up then. “Will it? You cannot know that! How can you know that?” “Oh, Ana, Ana. When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

448. “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

449. “I ain’t sorry for stealing it, just for getting caught.” “How come you took it?” “Cause,” she said. “Cause I could.” Those words stuck with me. Mauma didn’t want that cloth, she just wanted to make some trouble. She couldn’t get free and she couldn’t pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

450. “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