Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story? There are only speculative answers, but it seems plausible that Christianity and the Western world would have had a somewhat different religious and cultural inheritance. Perhaps women would have found more egalitarianism.

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.

Mauma didn't fall again, though, and I reckoned God had lent me an ear, but maybe that ear wasn't white, maybe the world had a colored God, too, or else it was mauma who kept her own self standing, who answered my prayer with the strength of her limbs and the grip of her heart. She never whimpered, never made a sound except some whisperings from her lips.

long aprons with starch. Off in the drawing room, it sounded like bees buzzing. Missus showed

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.

you got to figure out which end of the needle you're gon be, the one that's fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth. I

Yet from that first moment of inspiration to write this story, I felt the importance of imagining a married Jesus. Doing so provokes a fascinating question: How would the Western world be different if Jesus had married and his wife had been included in his story?

It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or if you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum.

I didn't know to call it religion back then, didn't know Amen from what-when

In the hidden forest in my chest, the trees slowly lost their leaves.

She was a small, hot-tempered woman who wore a widow's cap with strings floating at her cheeks, and when it was cold, a squirrely fur cloak and tiny fur-lined shoes. She was known to line girls up on the Idle Bench for the smallest infraction and scream at them until they fainted. I despised her, and her "polite education for the female mind," which was composed

I saw then what I hadn't seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I'd lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I'd grown comfortable with the particulars of evil.

Must our imaginations be so feeble as that, Thomas? If the Union dies, as our old president says, it will be from lack of imagination… It will be from Southern hubris, and our love of wealth, and the brutality of our hearts!

Forming a critique is essential to the birth and development of a spiritual feminist consciousness. Until a woman is willing to set aside her unquestioned loyalty and look critically at the tradition and convention of her faith, her awakening will never fully emerge. The extent of her healing, autonomy, and power is related to the depth of the critique she is able to integrate into her life.

Anger is effortless, Lucian. Kindness is hard.

Uncovering this need has been like finding an empty room in the center of my house, one I didn't know was there, one I couldn't pass without feeling its vacuity and wondering how it should be filled. I know I came to Greece in part to try and fill this vacancy in myself. I just didn't think it would have anything to do with Mary.

Aunt-Sister would've said, 'Let her go, it's past the time,' but I wanted the pain of mauma's face and hands more than the peace of being without them.

I looked at him. I'd held the world too close and it had slipped from my arms.

Instead she told me that I had traveled to a secret sky, the one beyond this one where the queen of heaven reigns, for Yahweh knew nothing of female matters of the heart.

Nina and I laughed, and then astonishingly, Mother laughed, and the sound the three of us made together in the room created a silly joy inside me.

I personally keep slave documents listing the value of slaves framed on my wall in California, and in my office in Chicago.

After a while, I went down to the cellar. When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, "Ain't nobody can write down in a book what you worth.

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.

Jonkonnu if you want to. That was a custom that got started