Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh's heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible.

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Don't be telling me--can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is.

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.

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

It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin.

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.

You're looking for a reason, " she said. "And that doesn't help. It doesn't change the present.

The basic dynamics of conversion are summed up for me in the words LEAVE-ARRIVE, END-BEGIN, SHED-EMERGE. These are the tensions of conversion and spiritual awakening.

I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any.

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

The whole problem with people is they know what matters but they don't choose it. ~Secret Lives of Bees

I have knots in my years that I can't undo, and this is one of the worst--the night I did wrong and Mauma got caught

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process.