Top 500 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 9 of 10

401. “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

402. “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

403. “A More Resourceful Reprimand.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

408. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

429. “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

430. “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

431. “Glancing behind me, I saw that the few who’d remained to walk with him were women. Where were these disciples of his? The fishermen? The men? Were women the only ones with hearts large enough to hold such anguish?”

— Sue Monk Kidd

432. “Far away, I heard the mournful call of an owl. The sound caused a pressure in my throat and I realized it was the need to fashion a story. To call into the blackness like the owl.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

433. “Life had taken a mallet to me.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

434. “What a shitbucket.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

435. “This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

436. “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

437. “I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I’d once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “The sun’s pink fingers were still wrapped around the clouds.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

445. “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

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

— Sue Monk Kidd

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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