Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

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“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”

“Regrets don't help anything.”

“This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.”

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

“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.”

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

“So few people know what they're capable of.”

“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.”

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

“When mauma saw my raw eyes, she said, “Ain’t nobody can write down in a book what you worth.”

“We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.”

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

“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.”

“Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.”

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

“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.”

“When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.”

“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, matters.”

“I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again… how loving and being in love could be so different.”

“I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.”

“God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world—but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing.” She cut her eyes at me and smiled. “I think we know that’s men’s doing.”

“You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.”

“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”

“She didn't even know how dangerous the truth could be, all the tiny, shattering seeds it carried.”

“It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.”

“Everybody needs a seashell in her bathroom to remind her the ocean is her home.”

“I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only thing I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.”

“Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and reminds you who you could be with a little work.”