Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

I'd heard August say more than once, "If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you." T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.

Sue Monk Kidd
When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.

Sue Monk Kidd
It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

Sue Monk Kidd
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
As long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark.

Sue Monk Kidd
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.

Sue Monk Kidd
I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

Sue Monk Kidd
You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair...

Sue Monk Kidd
I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.

Sue Monk Kidd
Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

Sue Monk Kidd
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.

Sue Monk Kidd
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.

Sue Monk Kidd
I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.

Sue Monk Kidd
That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log thrown on the fires of love.

Sue Monk Kidd
All that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

Sue Monk Kidd
Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

Sue Monk Kidd
This is the autumn of wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.

Sue Monk Kidd
And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.

Sue Monk Kidd
You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.

Sue Monk Kidd
It only meant that my natural inclination was to draw my "energy" from within instead of seeking it outside myself, plus my mom was an introvcert, and so were a lot of normal people. The problem was I was shy on top of that. And we all know how the world loves a shy introvert.

Sue Monk Kidd
Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.

Sue Monk Kidd
After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.

Sue Monk Kidd
Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?

Sue Monk Kidd
I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.

Sue Monk Kidd
There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.

Sue Monk Kidd
There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

Sue Monk Kidd
Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.

Sue Monk Kidd
Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.

Sue Monk Kidd
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.

Sue Monk Kidd
One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality... just be what it is.

Sue Monk Kidd