Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

In an interview, novelist Alice Walker says, You think you can avoid [pain], but actually you can't. If you do, you just get sicker, or you feel more pain. But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing

What a shitbucket.

If God said in plain language, "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

It was foolish to think some things were beyond happening, even being attracted to Negroes. I'd honestly thought such a thing couldn't happen, the way water could not run uphill or salt could not taste sweet. A law of nature. Maybe it was a simple matter of being attracted to what I couldn't have.

If you must err, do so on the side of audacity. That was the little slogan I'd devised for myself.

it's something everybody wants—for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

She was braver than I, she always had been. I cared too much for the opinion of others, she cared not a whit. I was cautious, she was brash. I was a thinker, she was a doer. I kindled fires, she spread them. And right then and ever after, I saw how cunning the Fates had been. Nina was one wing, I was the other.

Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die. A lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin. -Sue Monk Kidd

It washed over me for the first time in my life how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets. Ever since school let out this summer, it had been nothing but skin pigment every livelong day. I was sick of it.

After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.

There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from hinges where you've hung it so careful.

God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. (Nicolas of Cusa)

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do. Such a notion made it virtually impossible to enjoy life.

He will use the word love, and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything. A person shouldn't look too far down her nose at absurdities. Look at me. I dived into one absurd thing after another, and here I am in the pink house. I wake up to wonder everyday.

The queen, for her part, is the unifying force of the community; if she is removed from the hive, the workers very quickly sense her absence. After a few hours, or even less, they show unmistakable signs of queenlessness.

There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life.

The first week at August's was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

Increasingly, during those classes, longings had seized me, foreign, torrential aches that overran my heart. I wanted to know things, to become someone.

Isn't flexibility more perfect than stasis?

I sat at her desk and turned one page after another, staring at what looked like bits and pieces of black lace laid cross the paper.

I couldn't imagine what it cost him to say these words. I do, I said. And you must forgive me.

Does he think my writing is not a prayer? Does he think because I hold a pen I don't grieve?

Well,' August said, going right on with her pasting, 'you know, she's really just the figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way.