Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

June Singer points out, when a girl is growing up, it is not taken for granted, as it is with boys, that her life and needs will be primary, that she will have access to places of authority and power like her brothers or father. What is taken for granted is that she will find her main source of fulfillment through her husband and family, that she will be secondary to them.35 A

One thing is beautiful beyond my words to say it: August holding you.

July 1, 1964, I lay in bed, waiting for the bees to show up, thinking of what Rosaleen had said when I told her about their nightly visitations. "Bees swarm before death," she'd said.

That's one of the worst things about living with brilliant people—they're so used to being right they don't really have experience being anything else.

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Bees swarm before death. She was full of crazy ideas that I ignored, but I lay there thinking about this one, wondering if the bees had come with my death in mind.

This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.

He'd cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he'd refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.

There is a time to be gentle and a time to be fierce

Well, August said, going right on with her pasting, you know, she's really just the figurehead off an old ship, but the people needed comfort and rescue, so when they looked at it, they saw Mary, and so the spirit of Mary took it over. Really, her 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.

Really, her 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 have noticed that, if you look carefully at people's eyes, the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through, for just an instant before it flickers away.

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward's way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn't mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.

It was the twilit hour. Moroseness didn't come easily to me—anger did, yes; passion and stubbornness, always—but sitting here, I felt bereft.

Years ago, your father and I adopted this piece of chain as a symbol for our marriage. The two outer links represent each of our lives and the center link, our marriage. It reminds us that we have independent lives, dreams, and journeys, but at the same time, we are joined in a center space where our lives are one. We

She'll outlive the last cockroach

When darkness fell, she fell with it.

I loved her the way you love God, with all my heart and soul and might.

Pilgrims are poets who create by taking journeys.

Sunk in the mud, it took all my strength to flip it over. I lifted out the oar and inspected the bottom for holes and rotted wood. Seeing none, I gathered up my skirt, climbed in, and paddled to the middle of the pond, an untouchable place, far from everything. I tried to think what I would say to him, worried my voice would slink off again and leave me. I remained there a long while, lapping on the surface. Vapor curled on the water, dragonflies pricked the air, and I thought it all beautiful.

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. 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.

Chickens, sheep, and donkeys. Manure and urine. Grunting and mating. The insect blizzard at the water trough. Hoof-churned dirt. It even came to me that these things might be holy, too, a sacrilege I kept to myself.

Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness. Missus was a short