Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening.

I have noticed that if you look carefully at people's eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away.

After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.

When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it?

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home

There is nothing perfect...only life.

All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.

Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands.

Sunset is the saddest light there is.

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.

The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days.

There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.

The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

You gotta imagine what's never been.

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.

some things don't matter much. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart--now, that matters. The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.

To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.

It's your time to live, don't mess it up.

The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.

In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional...What a special case I was.

I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me.

I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now

Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.

If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.

It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart.

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.

I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.

I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?

Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die.

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

My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it's the other way round.

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair...

I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.

There's no pain on earth that doesn't crave a benevolent witness.

women made the best beekeepers 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.

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

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

People in general would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

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.

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

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

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

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

Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.

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.

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.

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

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed.

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.

Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through. When I'm dead and gone, That's what I want from you. The streets of heaven are gold and sunny, But I'll stick with my plot and a pot of honey. Place a beehive on my grave And let the honey soak through.

At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.

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

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.

Regrets don't help anything.

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.

You know, some things don't matter that much...Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart - now, that matters.

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much...like the color of a house...But lifting a person's heart--now that matters. The whole problem with people--" Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't... August:...They know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters.

I believe in the goodness of imagination.

I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.

If you don't know where your're going, you should know where you came from.

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.

Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.

So few people know what they're capable of.

For a moment 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.

Sometimes I didn't even feel like getting out of bed. I took to wearing my days-of-the-week panties out of order. It could be Monday and I'd have on underwear saying Thursday. I just didn't care.

The whole problem with people is they don't know what matters and what doesn't.

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.

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. If God said in plain language, "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.

All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.

In writing The Invention of Wings, I was inspired by the words of Professor Julius Lester, which I kept propped on my desk: “History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another’s pain in the heart our own.

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.

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.

The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning. As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing. I also needed to hear other women's stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman's story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven't seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illumine my conflicts. Her resolutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones. If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.