Sue Monk Kidd citations

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“I believe in the goodness of imagination.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It was the in-between time, before day leaves and night comes, a time I’ve never been partial to because of the sadness that lingers in the space between going and coming.”

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

“I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“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 wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.”

“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.”

“The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.”