Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

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

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

Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: "History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own.

A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world.

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier.

I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn't choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I'd accepted Israel's proposal, I would've regretted that, too. I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to.

Missus said I was the worst waiting maid in Charleston. She said, "You are abysmal, Hetty, abysmal." I asked Miss Sarah what abysmal means and she said, "Not quite up to standard." Uh huh. I could tell from missus' face, there's bad, there's worse, and after that comes abysmal.

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

Our one true God dwelled inside the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem, and I was sure it was impious to speak of a similar place existing inside humans, and worse still to suggest that yearnings inside girls like me had intimations of divinity. It was the most beautiful, wicked blasphemy I'd ever heard.

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different

If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you.

Do you think I could keep bees one day?" I asked. August said, "Didn't you tell me this past week one of the things you loved was bees and honey? Now, if that's so, you'll be a fine beekeeper. Actually, you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough." The

I pressed Yaltha to set a course, but she persisted in her waiting, saying if the pot was tended long enough, the answer would bubble to the surface.

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair.

El secreto de una buena mentira es no dar demasiadas explicaciones y aportar un buen detalle.

I laid my palm on the second square – the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.

I'd thought of my aunt as invincible, impervious—someone assailed by life, but somehow unmaimed by it—but I saw her suddenly as a person of flaws and bruises like myself. There was an odd relief in it.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait. . . .                           So the darkness shall be the light,                           and the stillness the dancing. T. S. ELIOT

It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.

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.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.

I worried so much about how i looked and whether i was doing things right, i felt half the time i was impersonating a girl instead of really being one. - Lily

I could no more pretend I didn't have a mother than the sea could pretend it had no salt. My mother existed for me with a vengeance. Sometimes her voice would come piping through my bones and practically lift me off my feet.

People give pain, are callous and insensitive, empty and cruel…but place heals the hurt, soothes the outrage, fills the terrible vacuum that these human beings make.