Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

That night in my bed in the honey house, when I closed my eyes, bee hum ran through my body. Ran through the whole earth. It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

When you're unsure of yourself," she said, "when you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she's the one inside saying, 'Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.' She's the power inside you, you understand?

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.

She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. That day, our hearts were pure as they ever would get.

Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through. When I'm dead and gone, that's what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, but I'll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through.

Write what's inside here, inside your holy of holies

I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages? August said. And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving a Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have more ways to say it?

Our experience of our body has been immersed in shame. Waking to the sacredness of the female body will cause a woman to "enter into" her body in a new way, be at home in it, honor it, nurture it, listen to it, delight in its sensual music. She will experience her female flesh as beautiful and holy, as a vessel of the sacred. She will live from her gut and feet and hands and instincts and not entirely in her head.

Her forbidden bath all those months ago still hung leaden between us, though Handful didn't seem the least bit ashamed by my discovery of it. Rather the opposite, she was like someone who'd risen to her full measure.

Have you noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? While

Then he rose and, opening the door, stared toward the valley with the same deep, pure gaze he'd cast on me. I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.

He's over your head!" He was, but naturally I'd flung myself into the Sea of Voltaire anyway and emerged with nothing more than several aphorisms.

Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you.

We ate till we were tired out from eating, which is the way people in South Carolina eat at family reunions.

I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence Was there ever a more galling verse in the Bible?

Senti, so che le tue intenzioni erano buone quando hai creato il mondo e tutto quanto ma come hai potuto permettere che si allontanasse da te in questo modo? Com'è che non ti sei attenuto alla tua idea originale di paradiso?

I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I'd once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.

The story quilt in the novel was inspired by the magnificent quilts of Harriet Powers, an enslaved woman from Georgia who used African appliqué technique to tell stories about biblical events and historical legends. Her two surviving quilts are archived at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

I said out loud, Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is. Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing. Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all.

How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

The bees came the summer of 1964

Like God's, women's toil had no beginning and no end.