Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

And I am she whose God is magnificent . . . I am being I am she who is nothing . . . I am the coming together and the falling apart I am the enduring and the disintegration . . . I am what everyone can hear and no one can say I sang on and on, and when the hymn was ended, I walked slowly back to my place.

Let life be life.

If Jacob's ladder reached all the way to heaven, so, too, did ours.

The moon was round and white, sitting small at the top of the sky. It seemed the right size to sit in the bowl on the bullet mold. That was what I wished. I wished for the moon instead of lead.

I walked back past the stable and carriage house. The path took me cross the whole map of the world I knew. I hadn't yet seen the spinning globe in the house that showed the rest of it.

John raised his hands to quiet the uproar. "You ask who I am—I will tell you who I am. I am a voice crying in the wilderness.

The kjerringsleppet were a marvelous image for the empowered self. A "woman on the loose" is a woman who leaves the woods where she has been growing strong all these years. She swoops out of the trees, ringing her bell. She is saying, I am here now. And I am not going away. The motto that the women on the loose adopted is: "To improvise, surprise, and come uninvited." That's not a half-bad motto.

Is there more to me than the roles I live out? Can I open up to my identity apart from them, to the knowledge that I'm more than the personas I create?

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved to in assimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

I was willful, impulsive, composed of strange hopes and selfish rebellion. I must have been very hard for her to love.

WHEN JOHN CALLED UPON the multitude to repent and be cleansed of their sins, we streamed into the river with the rest of them. I didn't go in hungry to turn back to God's law—I went desiring to cleanse myself of fear and deadness of spirit. I went repenting of my silence and of the meagerness of my hope. I went thinking of the newborn self I'd dreamed of birthing.

There was so much in the world to be had and not had.

The wind whipped up and I listened for ship sails snapping in the harbor cross the road, a place I'd smelled on the breeze, but never seen. The sails would go off like whips cracking and all us would listen to see was it some slave getting flogged in a neighbor-yard or was it ships making ready to leave. You found out when the screams started up or not.

By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I'd just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I'd lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding.

Enough, child. You've grieved enough. I understand he has abandoned you, but must you abandon yourself?

I realized it was conceivable that Ann and I both, in our own way, were experiencing a crisis, which according to its definition is: (1) a crucial stage or turning point, and (2) an unstable or precarious situation. At the very least

I am the whore and the holy woman I am the wife and the virgin

My prescription," he said, "is that you take him to Long Branch for the summer. It's a small, rather isolated place on the New Jersey shore known for its sea cure. I'll send you with laudanum and paregoric. He should be outside as much as possible. Encourage him to wade in the ocean, if he's able. By fall, perhaps he'll be recovered enough to travel home." Perhaps I would be home with

Ann was struggling to figure out the beginning of being a woman, and I, the beginning of the ending of it.

People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come

When someone tries to put you back into a box from which you've already escaped, you might recall a line from the Indian poet Mirabai. She said, "I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious!"13

felt alone in the world with my alien ideas.

Ain't nobody can write down in a book what you worth.