Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

People with profound human needs and suffering do not, as I have half-imagined and half-wished, travel in a boat separate from mine. In ways I have scarcely appreciated, we are all in the same boat, and I can't be unavailable to their suffering without jeopardizing my own soul.

The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.

I helped Rosaleen some in the kitchen, but mostly I was free to lie around and write in my notebook. I wrote so many things from my heart that I used up all the pages.

I was afraid, though, the blame would find a way to stick to them. That's how blame was.

You don't have to feel love for her. Only try to act with love

Anybody who thinks dying is the worst thing doesn't know a thing about life.

an unbearable heaviness came over me.

If you don't know where you're going, you should know where you came from.

If you think the country is quiet, you've never lived in it. Tree frogs alone make you wish for earplugs.

The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. 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.

Rather than dilute our relationship, the freedom I was claiming helped solidify it. For in the long run, when a woman breaks out of boxes that have limited her, when she sets her plucky self free and begins to nourish and enrich herself, her relationships are nourished and enriched as well.

her face like a seawall

Myths born in patriarchy offer a limited source of data on women. What they usually tell is how women react under patriarchy.

Pay them no mind and turn the other cheek. Their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw.

Let me first go and bury my father." Jesus gave him what seems like a harsh answer: "Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead" (Matt. 8:21–22). But when you apply the answer to the process of inner transformation, it makes perfect sense. This is a call to separation. To "leave the dead." In order to follow the inner journey, we need to leave behind those things that are deadening, the loyalties that no longer have life for us.

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.' I

Carry on, my sisters.

I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die,' a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

Looking back on it now, I want to say the bees were sent to me. I want to say they showed up like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary, setting events in motion I could never have guessed.

I think of the dictum that when one person in a relationship starts to become conscious, the other is compelled to become conscious, too. Awakening precipitates awakening, and sometimes a woman's dogged groping for enlightenment and wholeness will ignite the process in her mate (or vice versa).

The place of expansion is always on the border, on the edge... If we're going to become whole, we have to go to the edge.

it washed over me for the first time in my life just 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.

It was respect she had for feelings, how she believed it was inimical to the soul to deny them.

But we all have some largeness in us, don't we, Ana?