Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

We must wake up, journey, name, challenge, shed, reclaim, ground, and heal.

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night 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.

The female soul is no small thing. Neither is a woman's right to define the sacred from a woman's perspective.

Ah, but never underestimate the power of a dismissed dream. I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.

If we were to abuse our children, Social Services would show up at our doors. If we were to abuse our pets, the Humane Society would come to take us away. But there is no Creativity Patrol or Soul Police to intervene if we insist on starving our own souls.

When women bond together in a community in such a way that "sisterhood" is created, it gives them an accepting and intimate forum to tell their stories and have them heard and validated by others. The community not only helps to heal their circumstance, but encourages them to grow into their larger destiny.

The aim of the novelist is not only to hold up a mirror to the world, but to imagine what's possible.

Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I'd lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.O

you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

the idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church is almost unfathomable. . . . We think there's nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a a whole new consciousness.

No assurance, no platitude, no promise of God's mercy. Just a stark reminder that death was part of life. She offered me nothing but a way to accept whatever came-Let life be life. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words.

the men expressed the shock of reading something geared exclusively to the feminine. It stunned them with an awareness of what women experience. They said they'd felt religiously excluded for the first time in their lives.

You know what? You think too much. It would do you a world of good to stop thinking and just go with your feelings once in a blue moon.

The sting shot pain all the way to my elbow, causing me to marvel at how much punishment a minuscule creature can inflict. I'm prideful enough to say I didn't complain. After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. I just dived back into the riptide of saving bees.

We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

books The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits were narratives of my spiritual experience. I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing

I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing.

since for all I knew, people might come back one day as the very thing they killed.

Mauma came down with a limp. When she was in her room or in the kitchen house for meals, she didn't have any trouble, but the minute she stepped in the yard, she dragged her leg like it was a dead log.

go. I, I am without God And I am she whose God is magnificent . . . I am being I am she who is nothing . . . I am the coming together and the falling apart I am the enduring and the disintegration . . . I am what everyone can hear and no one can say

It was unthinkable. Unmarried daughters didn't go off to live unprotected on their own in a foreign place. They lived at home with their mothers, and when there was no mother, with their sisters, and when there were no sisters, with their brothers.

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.

To name is to define and shape reality.

Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, "Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?" The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.