Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “The truth,” she said, “is that every girl must have ambition knocked out of her for her own good. You are unusual only in your determination to fight what is inevitable. You resisted and so it came to this, to being broken like a horse.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

403. “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

404. “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

405. “A More Resourceful Reprimand.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

411. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

413. “For what it’s worth, charting one’s passion in a small daybook kept hidden in a hatbox inside a wardrobe does not subdue passion in the least.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

414. “We can’t change anything until we acknowledge the problem.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

417. “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

418. “John raised his hands to quiet the uproar. “You ask who I am – I will tell you who I am. I am a voice crying in the wilderness.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

419. “In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

420. “Mothergod, I have nothing to hold me. No place to be, inside or out. I need to find a container of support, a space where my journey can unfold.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

450. “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