Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.

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.

There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.

Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention.

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

My mother's life was way too heavy for me.

If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.

Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.

And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it.

In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

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

We 're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren 't we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we'll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that's all - Lucretia Mott in The Invention of Wings ? Sue Monk Kidd

I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all.

I'm tired of carrying around the weight of the world. I'm just going to lay it down now. It's my time to die, and it's your time to live. Don't mess it up.

Loss takes up inside of everything sooner or later and eats right through it.

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. There's a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.

I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall – I dove.

Did you know there are thirty-two names for love in one of the Eskimo languages? August said. And we just have this one. We are so limited, you have to use the same word.

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.

Regrets don't help anything.

The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.

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.

the redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.