Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

We had a citywide emergency on our hands, as there is no greater affliction for the southern mind than people up north coming down to fix our way of life.

Handful was my basket name.

You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.

We can't change anything until we acknowledge the problem.

A Divine Feminine symbol acts to deconstruct patriarchy, which is one of the reasons there's so much resistance, even hysteria, surrounding the idea of Goddess. The idea of Goddess is so powerfully "other," so vividly female, it comes like a crowbar shattering the lock patriarchy holds on divine imagery.

The shape she loved was a triangle. Always black. Mauma put black triangles on about every quilt she sewed.

You know, some things don't matter that much, Lily. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart—now, that matters.

I was gonna say, The problem is they know what matters, but they don't choose it. You know how hard that is, Lily? I love May, but it was still so hard to choose Caribbean Pink. The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart, that's Mary, too, not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it, Lily, that's the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love—but to persist in love.

and a true brass thimble. Mauma said the thimble would be mine one day. When she wasn't using it, I wore it on my fingertip like a jewel.

That was the thing mauma and I loved, our time with the quilts.

Regrets don't help anything, you know that.

Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require its social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die. —The Queen Must Die: And Other Affairs of Bees and Men

Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty."10

I'll take nine steps and look up. Whatever my eyes light on, that's my sign. I saw a crop duster plunging his little plane over a field of growing things, behind him a cloud of pesticides parachuting out. I couldn't decide what part of the scene I represented: the plants about to be rescued from the bugs or the bugs about to be murdered by the spray. There was an off chance I was really the airplane zipping over the earth creating rescue and doom everywhere I went.

I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls. So it was with the words I wrote. They reveled till dawn. xvii.

Quietness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. I didn't know if it was the emptiness, the

that strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don't see how you could ever sustain yourself there.

She's the mother of thousands.

I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be.

She didn't say, Come on now, stop your crying, everything's going to be okay, which is the automatic thing people say when they want you to shut up. She said, "It hurts, I know it does. Let it out. Just let it out.

I am grown, with children of my own. But inside I am still a daughter. A daughter is a woman who remains internally dependent, who does not shape her identity and direction as a woman, but tends to accept the identity and direction projected onto her. She tends to become the image of woman that the cultural father idealizes.

What else do you love, Lily?" No one had ever asked me this before. What did I love?