Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

To be ignored, to be forgotten, this was the worst sadness of all. I swore an oath to set down their accomplishments and praise their flourishings, no matter how small. I would be a chronicler of lost stories. It was exactly the kind of boldness Mother despised.

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 i.

When I was being forgiving, I said that my mother was simply exhausted. I suspected, though, she was simply mean.

Really, her [Mother Mary] 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… I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn't recognize them.

A man's holy of holies contains God's laws, but inside a woman's there are only longings.

Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?

Patience is everything. RAINER MARIA RILKE

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

I stared at the statue, feeling the fractured place in my heart.

How does one know the voice is God's? I believed the voice bidding me to go north belonged to him, though perhaps what I really heard that day was my own impulse to freedom. Perhaps it was my own voice. Does it matter?

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. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.

I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.

When I tell you all shall be well, I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.

A child as awkward as I required an explanation. My father suggested that while God was busy knitting me together in my mother's womb, he'd become distracted and mistakenly endowed me with gifts destined for some poor baby boy. I don't know if he realized how affronting this must have been to God, at whose feet he laid the blunder.

His laugh rose and fell and rose again, and I told myself I could love him for that alone.

Nina was one wing, I was another--Sarah Grimke

It's thought we're too weak to face danger and hardship. But do we not give birth? Do we not work day and night? Are we not ordered about and silenced? What are robbers and rainstorms compared to these things?

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants—for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

Everything I did felt heavy and difficult—drying the dishes, kneeling for evening prayers, even pulling down the sheets to get into bed.

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.

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

Perhaps the thing most denied to women is anger. "Forbidden anger, women could find no voice in which publicly to complain; they took refuge in depression," writes Carolyn Heilbrun.56 Her words came true for me. Without the ability to allow or the means to adequately express the anger, I began to slide into periods of depression.

I'd held the world too close and it had slipped from my arms.