Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

It has come as a great revelation to me that abolitionist is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

It was possible to close your eyes and exit life without actually dying. You just had to faint.

Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice.

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies.

I would like to be free of the part of me that dares too little and fears too much.

We are looking for ways our stories fit together.

You think there's no detriment in a slave learning to read? There are sad truths in our world, and one is that slaves who read are a threat.

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.

And it comes to me that the echoes of my own life will likely die away in that way thunder does. But this life, what a shining thing—it is enough.

I thought of the girl who bathed in a copper tub. I thought of the woman who stole a bullet mold. I loved that girl, that woman.

Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity's sake, not two.

he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.

What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn't the largeness in you that matters most, it's your passion to bring it forth.

Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind.

As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say! he shouted. Then I'll find another roof, I thought. You understand me? he said. Yes sir, I understand I said, and I did too. I understand that a new rooftop would do wonders for me.

For always, always, we are waking up and then waking up some more.

Women who bear the weight of opposition, she wrote, create a shelter for the rest of us.

Why should God's perfection be based on having an unchanging nature?" I asked. "Isn't flexibility more perfect than stasis?

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she'd taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, "I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel." It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. "So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you're gon be, the one that's fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

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. ... When you're unsure of yourself, 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.

For years I'd written down my dreams, believing, as I still do, that one of the purest sources of knowledge about our lives comes from the symbols and images deep within.