Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

the Royal Scribe of the Metropolis from Haran ben Philip Levias of the Jewish Council. I attest that Chaya, daughter of my sister, Yaltha, died in the month of Epeiph of the 32nd year of the Emperor Augustus Caesar. As her guardian and kinsman, I request that her name be entered

It seems now I said this with smugness, as if I were somehow immune because I, after all, had a life of my own, creative passions, a spiritual journey, a career separate from my role of mother. Ann was rightly abducted from me

Ana, I don't doubt you should give yourself to motherhood. I only question what it is you're meant to mother. For two days and nights I pondered her words, so vast and inscrutable. For a woman to birth something other than children and then mother it with the same sense of purpose, attention, and care came as an astonishment, even to me.

But if you can speak it, if you can write it, if you can paint it, it is very healing.24

oldest brother, Haran, is on the Jewish council in Alexandria and he struck a deal with the Romans to allow the council to determine my fate. They sent me away to the Therapeutae." "Therapeutae?" I repeated, feeling how thick the word was on my tongue. "What is it?" "It's a community of Jews. Philosophers, mostly. Like me, like you, they come from educated and affluent families with servants

Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself

I was shrewd like mauma. Even at ten I knew this story about people flying was pure malarkey. We weren't some special people who lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it.

I told Sabe floor-scrubbing was winter

As I painted, deeply buried emotions boiled to the surface.

realize with horrifying certainty that Ann has fallen into the hole. I drop onto my knees and call into the blackness. I scream her name until the sound clots in my throat. I don't know what to do. Finally I search for a flashlight so I can see down into the opening.

A wave of fear passed through me. Our lives and fates left to men. This world, this God-forsaken world.

I think beginnings must have their own endings hidden inside them.

It had not occurred to me that my abilities had been intended, that God had meant to bestow these blessings on me.

Some truths seemed insoluble, stones that couldn't be swallowed.

Old Woman I meet you deep inside myself. There in the rootbed of fertility, World without end, as the legend tells it. Under the words you are my silence.

It was a circumambulation of such precise, ritualistic grief no one interfered.

I fell quiet, too. The wooden door onto the courtyard was flung wide onto the Egyptian night. I listened to wind shake the palm fronds. The dark, tumbling world.

All shall be well. I don't mean that life won't bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There's a place in you that is inviolate. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.

What I'd loved in him most was my own aliveness, his ability to give me back to myself

I was filled with a deep and immutable dread.

I said, "Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.

As I looked at their faces, love filled me up. It was the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too.

I must give myself to something.

mauma had found the part of herself that refused to bow and scrape, and once you find that, you got trouble breathing on your neck.