Quotes by Sue Monk Kidd

“Mother seemed happiest when making and tending home, the sewing machine whistling and the Mixmaster whirling. Her deepest impulse was to nurture, to simply dwell; it had nothing to do with ambition...”

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

“Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the cowards way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didnt mean a thing. I had to side with him ...”

“Every living creature on the earth is special. You want to be the one that puts an end to one of them?”

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

“Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a sta...”

“The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and shed taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd...”

“Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman ques...”

“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.”

“Probably one or two moments in your whole life you will hear a dark whispering spirit, a voice coming from the center of things. It will have blades for lips and will not stop until it speaks the o...”

“To condemn slavery was one thingthat I could do in my own individual heartbut female ministers!”

“It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.”

“But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to with...”

“The awakening passed from simple recognition of my need for God at the center of my life, to a depth where the will is stirred And that is a deeper place by far. That is the place of response, of u...”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what Id just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, ...”

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