Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

Or maybe desire kicked in when it pleased without noticing the rules we lived and died by.

It's part of our overall Body Negation Program.

Synchronicities, those times when an outer event resonates mysteriously and powerfully with what's happening inside, are more numerous during great shifts and upheavals. If we pay attention, if we approach them as symbolic and revelatory, they will often illuminate a way for us.

What matters is giving over to what you love.

I pulled out my bag and examined my mother's picture. I wondered what it had been like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in her darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.

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?

In the photograph by my bed my other 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.

I climbed into the honey wagon with my hair uncombed, with May handing me buttered toast and orange juice through the window and Rosaleen sticking in thermoses of water, both of them practically running alongside the truck while August rolled out of the driveway. I felt like the Red Cross springing to action to save the bee queendom.

I knew then that no matter how hard you tried, no matter how many jars of honey you threw, no matter how much you thought you could leave your mother behind, she would never disappear from the tender places in you.

How one minute she was talking to you and the next she had slipped into a private world where she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on. I wanted to say, Teach me how to do that. Teach me how to take all this in.

We stayed like that while bees swirled around our heads with a sound like sizzling bacon, a sound that no longer registered as danger. Danger, I realized, was a thing you got used to.

A worker bee is just over a centimeter long and weighs only about sixty milligrams; nevertheless, she can fly with a load heavier than herself.

But benevolent patriarchy is still patriarchy.

But you didn't love him enough to marry him?" She smiled at me. "I loved him enough," she said. "I just loved my freedom more.

I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing.

Sometimes things of magnitude settle over you with excruciating slowness. Say you break your ankle and don't feel it hurting till you've walked another block.

She didn't say, Come on now, stop your crying, everything's going to be okay, which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, 'It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.' So I did. With my mouth pressed against her dress, it seemed like I drew up my whole lifeload of pain and hurled it into her breast, heaved it with the force of my mouth, and she didn't flinch.

Readiness for dying arrives by attending the smallest moment and finding the eternal inside of it.

My mauma was shrewd. She didn't get any reading and writing like me. Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.

The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that's just me. Right

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. Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity. Earth becomes alive and sacred. And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered.

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, and the impassive way I'd treated them

All this love coming to me. I didn't know what to do with it. I wanted to say, I love you, too. I love you all. The feeling rose up in me like a column of wind, but when it got to my mouth, it had no voice, no words. Just a lot of air and longing.

I didn't see why loving someone had to have so much agony attached to it. It felt like a series of fresh cuts in the skin of my heart