Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

I was a Nancy Drew girl. Also Grimms' fairy tales.

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.

On weekends, I sit in a lounge chair on my balcony. I love to be outside when the weather's right. I can stay there pretty much all day.

I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke.

I'm always captivated by stories of women who find a way to be daring - misbehaving women.

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.

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

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.

I prefer to read print books. Maybe I'm just a little old-school. I do read e-books.

It's easy to operate under the illusion that what we are doing is so important we cannot stop doing it. ... Stopping is a spiritual act. It is the refuge where we drink life in.

Stopping is a spiritual art. It is the refuge where we drink life in.

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

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

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.

For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it's a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me.

Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.

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

You gotta imagine what's never been.

I want to believe that while we may sometimes read in the misguided pursuit of preserving our separation, there is a greater impulse inside us that compels us to read in search of the common heart.

When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

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.

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.

Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.