Sue Monk Kidd famous quotes

Once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Lying #Suitcases #Truth Is

All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Needs #Needed Someone #Needed

The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Memories #Laughter #Book

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

#Eye #People #Shining

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Relationship #Hands #Giving

It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Hurt #Matter #Done

What has happened to our ability to dwell in the unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Pain #Waiting #Endurance

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Prayer #Heart #Want

How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refocusing our attention keeping our minds and hearts directed toward God. The essence of the centered life is attention to God in all we think, say and do. It is the growing realization of His presence in our most down-to-earth living.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Heart #Thinking #Essence

Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Real #Lying #Doors

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#What Matters #Earth #Matter

Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Life #Thinking

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Lilies #Purpose #Enough

Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Cousin #Brother #School

There is no place so AWAKE and ALIVE as the edge of becoming.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Alive #Becoming #Awake

People in general would rather die than forgive. It's THAT hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Order #Giving #People

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Way #Coke #Use

That's the sacred intent of life, of God--to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Moving #Soul #Growth

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

#Writing #Stories #Who We Are

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Might #World #Fairness

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

#Betrayal #Writing #Destiny

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

#Long #Mind #Body

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

#Ache #Wanted

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...What a special case I was.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Hurt #Real #Nice

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

#World #Matter #Spinning

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

#Matter

There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, 'My soul is my own,' and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Community #Soul #Risk

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages?" August said. "And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#August #Names #Two

The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Powerful #Creativity #Hands

When you can't go forward, and you can't go backward, and you can't stay where you are without killing off something deep and vital in yourself, you are on the edge of creation.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Dream #Killing #Creation

The monk at St. Meinrad took his hands and placed them on my shoulders, peered straight into my eyes and said, ‘I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you.  I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes.  When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing.  You’re doing the most important something there is.  You’re allowing your soul to grow up.  If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Growing Up #Eye #Hands

Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Husband #Children #Women

I believe in the goodness of imagination.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Believe #Imagination #Goodness

There is nothing perfect...only life.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Perfect

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

#Special #Earth #Want

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

#Shining #Fabric #World

Something deep in all of us yearns for God's beauty, and we can find it no matter where we are.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Matter

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

#People #Forgiving

Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Rain #Envy #Storm

We become what we pay attention to.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Pay #Attention #Pay Attention

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

#Mother #Being A Mom #Stills

You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Home #Enough #Everlasting

We need Goddess consciousness to reveal earth's holiness. Divine feminine imagery opens up the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality. The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get to heaven, something secondary and expendable. Mater becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth comes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Book #Forever #Heaven

God is at the tip of our scalpels, our screwdrivers, our computer terminals, our dust rags, our vacuum cleaners, our pencils and pens. He is with us in our wheelchairs, or on our hospital beds, when all we can do is sit or lie flat. When we envision Him and His purpose in what we do, then we begin to grow aware of His presence in the middle of it. We are able to engage in our inward conversation with Him as we work, naturally, without strain. He becomes our partner, our collaborator.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#God #Lying #Dust

I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Dream #Thinking #Waiting

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

#Night #Rivers #Ribbons

Disconnected from my feminine soul, I had also unknowingly forfeited my power to name sacred reality. I had simply accepted what men had named. Neither had I noticed that when women give this power away, it is rarely used to liberate and restore value to women. More often it is used to shore up and enhance the privileged position of men.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Reality #Men #Names

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

#Support #Companionship #Social

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

#Waiting #Living My Life #Crevice

I felt a trembling along my skin, a treaveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. 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

#Long #Mind #Skins

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 think 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 t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Moon #Thinking #Air

Into every life a little rain must fall.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Inspirational #Fall #Rain

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Writing #Taste #Moments

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Spiritual #Years #Profound

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

#Mom #People #Shy

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Believe #Mean #Reality

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

#Like You #Not Afraid

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

#Crush #Children #Giving Up

Grandmotherhood initiated me into a world of play, where all things became fresh, alive, and honest again through my grandchildren's eyes. Mostly, it retaught me love.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Grandma #Eye #Grandmother

There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Acceptance #Knowing #Matter

I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Strange #Realizing #Young

I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Thinking

we need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for in the center we are rooted in god's love. in such a place there is no need for striving and impatience and dashing about seeking approval.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Vision #Approval #Needs

Journal became a sanctuary where I could pour out in honesty my pain and joy. It recorded my footsteps and helped me understand where I was standing, where I had been, and even where God pointed.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Pain #Honesty #Joy

I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Being In Love #Different #Amazed

We must err , do so on the side of audacity
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Audacity #Sides

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Mean #Embodiment

Stopping is a spiritual art. It is the refuge where we drink life in.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Spiritual #Art #Stopping

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Song #Soul #Listening

For me, creativity is essentially a spiritual experience, a conversation between my soul and me.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Spiritual #Creativity #Soul

Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through. When I'm dead and gone, That's what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, But I'll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Death #Heaven #Gold

The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

Just to be is holy, just to live is a gift.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Holy

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Ocean #Heart #Yelling

The whole problem with people is they don't know what matters and what doesn't.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#What Matters #People #Matter

A spiritual pilgrim needs to discern when his or her life is stunted in an old field and find the courage and determination to go to a "new land" that the Lord will show. (Abraham-Journey) ...so that you can find the wholeness you seek.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Spiritual #Determination #Journey

The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of unifying one's heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Heart #Simple #Feet

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Home #Sides #World

A moment of grace. There rose up within me a profound sense of being loved. I felt "gathered together" and encircled by a Presence completely loving, as if I were enveloped by the music of a love song created just for me. It was not overwhelming or even emotional. Just a warm knowing that I was in God's loving embrace...centered and unified there. [Love]encounters cannot be analyzed, only shared. If you take a butterfly, Robert Frost said, and pin it down into a box, you no longer have a butterfly.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Song #Butterfly #Emotional

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

#Girl #Mother #Autumn

It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Sadness #Night #Space

I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of the ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realize how it had comforted me. Quiteness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Ocean #Sleep #Missing

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.' 'Good night,' I said, and rolled onto my side. 'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Good Night #Mother #Mistake

the redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Sunset #Night #Purple

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

#Thinking #Mind #Want

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Moments #Begging #Feels

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body & flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms &  clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Nice #Dark #Giving

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#White #People #House

To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Evil #Faces #Silent

If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Two #Soul #Doe

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Looks #Bottom

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife?
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Ideas #Demand #Christianity

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

#Girl #Half #Whispering

As an adolescent, I went to charm school, where I learned to pour tea and relate to boys, which, as I recall, meant giving them the pickle jar to unscrew, whether it was too hard for me or not.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#School #Boys #Giving

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Thinking #Skin Color #Skins

I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Running #Home #Want

Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Fall #Heaven #Thank God

Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Real #Home #Self

Women themselves condition their daughters to serve the system of male primacy. If a daughter challenges it, the mother will generally defend the system rather than her daughter. These mothers, victims themselves, have unwittingly become wounded wounders. Women need to attack culture's oppression of women, for there truly is a godlike socializing power that induces women to "buy in" or collude, but we also need to confront our own part in accepting male dominance and take responsibility where appropriate.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Daughter #Mother #Women

When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly.
-- Sue Monk Kidd

#Butterfly #Long #Religion