Quotes from Sue Monk Kidd

...Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women's reformations.

I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn't what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to.

I write in a journal occasionally. But it is not a daily discipline for me.

Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work.

I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'

Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.

Giving voice to marginalised characters is extremely important to me. I want to explore the pain of disenfranchisement, the social strata and boundaries we create and how to make them more permeable.

Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?'

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient.

I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she'd been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole.

The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage.

When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small?

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.

For me, creativity is essentially a spiritual experience, a conversation between my soul and me.

So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith.