Sue Monk Kidd - The Secret Life of Bees (2001)

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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
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
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
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
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
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
You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

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
It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

Sue Monk Kidd
I sit in my new room and write everything down. My heart never stops talking.

Sue Monk Kidd
I said, "If I was a Negro girl-" He placed his fingers across my lips so I tasted his saltiness. "We can't think of changing our skin," he said. "Change the world-that's how we gotta think."

Sue Monk Kidd
People don't realize how smart bees are, evensmarter than dolphins. Bees know enough geometry to make row after row of perfect hexagons, angles so accurate you'd think they used rulers.

Sue Monk Kidd
"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer." "That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them." "Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been."

Sue Monk Kidd
A roach is a creature no one can love, but you cannot kill it. It will go on and on and on. Just try to get rid of it.

Sue Monk Kidd
I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.

Sue Monk Kidd
Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

Sue Monk Kidd
Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.

Sue Monk Kidd
Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

Sue Monk Kidd
You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside.

Sue Monk Kidd
It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.

Sue Monk Kidd
People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life.

Sue Monk Kidd
The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.

Sue Monk Kidd
In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

Sue Monk Kidd
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
We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.

Sue Monk Kidd
From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

Sue Monk Kidd
I have noticed that if you look carefully at people's eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away.

Sue Monk Kidd