Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

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.

this endless reaching for what couldn't be reached. It seemed foolish

You won't look over your shoulder, will you? She was referring [..] to the terrible inclination we women sometimes had to scurry back to safety. No, I told her. I won't look back.

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.

My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.

everything that had ever passed between us was present then, that it was hidden somewhere among the suffering.

Don't fear; {it} will live or it will not. We must let life be life. No assurance, no platitude, no promise of God's mercy. Just a stark reminder that death was part of life. She offered me nothing but a way to accept whatever came - Let life be life. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words.

But frankly, it may not be possible to completely avoid the clash of feelings that accompanies powerful transitions. Sometimes the exchange may be calm and fruitful, but often it's a wild taxi ride.

I couldn't be angered by her deceit—it didn't come from treachery. We women harbor our intimacies in locked places in our bodies. They are ours to relinquish when we choose.

Self-questioning is a far more essential ingredient in life than I ever supposed. It's the water that keeps the modeling clay of our life from hardening into something forever rigid and unchanging.

it came to me that I'd spoken of love, but he had not. He'd spoken of caring, of need-his, the children's, Green Hill's. Wouldn't I, wouldn't we be enough for you? he said. You would be a wonderful wife and the best of mothers. We would see to it that you never missed your ambition. It was his way of telling me. I could not have him and myself both.

but I believed in Sophia, who whispered bravery and wisdom in my ear day and night, if I would only listen, and I tried now to do that, to listen.

My aspiration to become a jurist had been laid to rest in the Graveyard of Failed Hopes, an all-female establishment.

Already that morning missus had taken her cane stick to me once cross my backside for falling asleep during her devotions. Every day, all us slaves, everyone but Rosetta, who was old and demented, jammed in the dining room before breakfast to fight off sleep while missus taught us short Bible verses like "Jesus wept" and prayed out loud about God's favorite subject, obedience. If you nodded off, you got whacked right in the middle of God said this and God said that.

She smiled and the skin wrinkled around her eyes in that way that makes a woman beautiful.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.

Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing?

Thirty-nine years in the fish tank had caught up with me.

Could we know the ways of God or not? Did he possess an intention for us, his people, as our religion believed, or was it up to us to invent meaning for ourselves? Perhaps nothing was as I'd thought.

One of nature's most healing gifts to us, though, is its reminder to us to stay grounded and connected to the natural cycles of life.

They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped.

I had got where I talked to her all the time. Like I would say, I didn't hear her talk back, so I hadn't lost my sanities.

I'd observed five of Mother's gestations, and clearly this was her most difficult. She'd enlarged to mammoth proportions. Even her poor face appeared bloated. Nevertheless, she'd created an elaborate fete.

My father says my mind is weak, and my tongue, weaker, she'd told me then. It seemed now her tongue was not weak, but the fiercest part of her.