Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

403. “I slept with grief and woke to it. It was always there, a black strap around my heart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

424. “We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

432. “I stared at the statue, feeling the fractured place in my heart.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

433. “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

434. “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

435. “Years later a friend said to me, “When a conventional wife with a conventional husband experiences a feminist awakening, there is bound to be a marital explosion.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

442. “Jesus’s capacity for mercy baffled me. I didn’t know if I could give up the wrongs my father had done, the way I hauled them around like an ossuary of precious old bones. Jesus made it seem as if one could just lay them down.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

443. “The Matriarchs The Tales of Terror Phasaelis and Herod Antipas My Life in Nazareth Lamentations for Susanna Jesus, Beloved Yaltha.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

444. “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

445. “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

446. “She smiled and the skin wrinkled around her eyes in that way that makes a woman beautiful.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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