Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

Water beaded across her shoulders, shining like drops of milk, and her breasts swayed in the currents. It was the kind of vision you never really get over. I couldn't help it, I wanted to go and lick the milk beads from her shoulders. I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn't know what. Mother, forgive.

If you can't be still and wait, you can't become what God created you to be.

I just mean that everything eventually ends. The two suns are always rising somewhere. That's part of life. Something ends and then something else will begin.

Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet. The time to assert one's right is when it's denied!

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

At crucial times we must seek out periods of inner solitude, deep brooding and being, intervals of spiritual apartness where we move down into the depths of ourselves to mine the dark gorge and bring new treasure into the light.

I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

When we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

A barge of mist floated along the water, and dragonflies, iridescent blue ones, darted back and forth like they were stitching up the air.

Later I would read Ursula K. Le Guin's comment: I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.

I live in a hive of darkness, and you are my mother, I told her. You are the mother of thousands.

As de Beauvoir put it, religion had given men a God like themselves--a God exclusively male in imagery, which legitimized and sealed their power. How fortunate for men, she said, that their sovereign authority has been vested in them by the Supreme Being.

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 Lord will show. Surely this one of our greatest challenges & capacities - to understand and reorient our lives, aligning ourselves with the God-given rhythms of growth and awakening that vibrate within.

Putting black cloths on the hives is for us. I do it to remind us that life gives way into death, and then death turns around and gives way into life.

June always said that most people bit off more than they could chew, but August chewed more than she bit off. ...she turned her thoughts over and over, digesting stuff most people would choke on.

In the end, the only monument that matters may be the work of love we carve into the lives around us.

Ich hatte schon oft gehoert wie Augusta gesagt hatte: Wenn du etwas vom jemanden brauchst dann bau dem anderen eine Bruecke auf der ihr euch begegnen koennt.

I wanted to know, and I didn't want to know. I was all hung up in limbo.

Danger, I realized, was a thing you got used to.

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

The night seemed like an inkblot I had to figure out.

Everything I wanted to say would have to wait, and I'd go back to the same suspended animation I'd been in before.