Quotes by Sue Monk Kidd

“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.”

“Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For...”

“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.”

“I believe in the goodness of imagination.”

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

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

“From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.”

“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 ...”

“The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat row...”

“When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some gratin...”

“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.”

“Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God....”

“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.”

“Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.”

“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.”

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

“As I squatted on the grass at the edge of the woods, the pee felt hot between my legs. I watched in puddle in the dirt, the smell of it rising into the night. There was no difference between my pis...”

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

“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.”

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