Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

When you're unsure of yourself, she said, when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, 'Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.' She's the power inside you, you understand? ~August Boatwright

I said, Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do? He snorted. You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours. That doesn't say much for the Lord. It doesn't say much for us, either.

Return to your longing. It will teach you everything.

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human.

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward.

I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

How can I explain such a thing? I simply know it in the way I know there's an oak tree inside an acorn...I've come to know it only this night, but it has always been the tree in the acorn.

Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She's the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don't care what their job is--they know the queen is their mother. She's the mother of thousands.

At that moment she seemed everything I was not, and this came as a small revelation. I had hated in her what I lacked in myself.

At the age of eleven, I owned a slave I couldn't free.O

There's a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.

My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.

Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?

They speak of Jesus as having had no wife," Lavi told me. That was a conundrum I puzzled over for months. Was it because I was absent when he traveled about Galilee during his ministry? Was it because women were so often invisible? Did they believe making him celibate rendered him more spiritual? I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.

Be consoled in knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart.

Why didn't I see this before? That my creative life is my deepest prayer. That I must pray it from my heart, from my soul.

You don't have to put your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and the other things we need to get through life, she said. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.

August says to Lily, You know some things don't matter that much Lily. Like the colour of the house. How big is that in overall scheme of life? But lifiting person's heart- now that matters. The whole problem with people is – they know what matters but they don't choose it. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters

You know, Lily, people can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness.

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night sky fell over me, and for a moment, I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark.

Every little thing wants to be loved

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.