Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.

In this manner I discovered that God had relegated my sex to the outskirts of practically everything

take credit, but it's all you. On a balmy afternoon

She bent and put her arms around me. "Sarah darling, you've fought harder than I imagined, but you must give yourself over to your duty and your fate and make whatever happiness you can."O

The anger made me brave and the grief made me sure.

Everything I knew about rape I'd learned from the Scriptures.

The oddest things caused me to miss her. Like training bras. Who was I going to ask about that? And who but my mother could've understood the magnitude of driving me to junior cheerleader tryouts? I can tell you for certain T. Ray didn't grasp it. But you know when I missed her the most? The day I was twelve and woke up with the rose-petal stain on my panties. I was so proud of that flower and didn't have a soul to show it to except Rosaleen.

It is the necessity of loss.

couldn't have explained then how the oak tree lives inside the acorn or how I suddenly realized that in the same enigmatic way something lived inside of me—the woman I would become—but it seemed I knew at once who she was.

He gazed at me with kindness and pity. "To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.

thought, If I'd been born male, dear God! the things I could have done! I longed for parity with men, the freedom and choices of men, the ability to quest without worrying about who would cook dinner or pick up the children. I longed for the power men had to name the world, for the world had been largely male defined. Even God "himself" was defined by men and envisioned in their image.

women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men. Until that moment I'd had no idea just how important language is in forming our lives. What happens to a female when all

It seemed like I was holding back a reservoir of doubt, pain, and disillusionment

Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness.

I always have cold feet but come on, they won't stop me.

but inside a woman's there are only longings.

The two most powerful impulses in my life have been the urge to create and the urge to be – a set of opposites – and they have always clunked into each other. How very like them to do so right now.

Your goodness will not be forgotten, I told him. Not a single act of your love will be squandered. You've brought God's kingdom as you hoped-you've planted it in our hearts.

But yours is the God of the Jews," Diodora said. "I know nothing of him. It's Isis I serve." "We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we'll find the God that exists behind them.

And despite all that Jesus had just said, all his prevarication and provisos, the most curious feeling came over me, that I was always meant to arrive at this moment.

he quoted a scripture from Ephesians, reciting from memory. "Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ." Then he made what many, including my mother, would call the most eloquent extemporization on slavery they'd ever heard. "Slaves, I admonish you to be content with your lot, for it is the will of God! Your obedience is mandated by scripture. It is commanded by God through Moses.

Go, be boiling clouds and lightning spears and sky-splitting roars.

a woman, nothing existed but the domestic sphere and those tiny flowers etched on the pages of my art book. For a woman to aspire to be a lawyer—well, possibly, the world would end. But an acorn grew into an oak tree, didn't it?

these good men who wished to quash us, gently, of course, benignly, for the good of abolition, for our own good, for their good, for the greater good. It was all so familiar. Theirs was only a different kind of muzzle.