99 Quotes & Sayings By Sue Monk Kidd

I hadn't been out to the hives before, so to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called 'bee yard etiquette'. She reminded me that the world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved. Sue Monk Kidd

If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you. Sue Monk Kidd

The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life. Sue Monk Kidd

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now. Sue Monk Kidd

There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance. Sue Monk Kidd

I can't explain that, except to say there's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at least, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance. Sue Monk Kidd

Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess. Sue Monk Kidd

How do we accomplish this matter of gathering life together in God? We must begin primarily by refocusing our attention keeping our minds and hearts directed toward God. The essence of the centered life is attention to God in all we think, say and do. It is the growing realization of His presence in our most down-to-earth living. Sue Monk Kidd

We need not avoid our active lives, but simply bring to them a new vision and shift of gravity. for in the center we are rooted in god's love. in such a place there is no need for striving and impatience and dashing about seeking approval. Sue Monk Kidd

I said, "Where's all that delivering God's supposed to do?" He snorted. "You're right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn't have any hands and feet but ours."" That doesn't say much for the Lord.""It doesn't say much for us, either. Sue Monk Kidd

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones. If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds. . Sue Monk Kidd

There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, “Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.” She looked at my face, how it flowed with sorrow and doubt, and she said, "You don't believe me? Where you think these shoulder blades of yours come from, girl?" We weren't some special people who had lost our magic. We were slave people, and we weren't going anywhere. It was later I saw what she meant. We could fly all right, but it wasn't any magic to it. Sue Monk Kidd

Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and husbands. Sue Monk Kidd

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket. Sue Monk Kidd

One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority. Sue Monk Kidd

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 think 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 t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way. . Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now Sue Monk Kidd

..The world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry, whistle. Anger agitates while whistling melts a bee's temper. Act like you know what you're doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved. . Sue Monk Kidd

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

I don't remember what they said, only the fury of their words, how the air turned raw and full of welts. Later it would remind me of birds trapped inside a closed room, flinging themselves against the windows and the walls, against each other. Sue Monk Kidd

Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do. To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on. Sue Monk Kidd

In the photograph by my bed my other is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

I said out loud, "Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is." Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing. Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it. Sue Monk Kidd

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real. Sue Monk Kidd

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 so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her. Sue Monk Kidd

I believe in the goodness of imagination. Sue Monk Kidd

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 and what doesn't... August:... They know what matters, but they don't choose it... The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

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. 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. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

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

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac. Sue Monk Kidd

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 rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94 Sue Monk Kidd

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 grating pebble in my shoe. Sue Monk Kidd

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home 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 and achievement in the world.. How had I come to believe that my world of questing and writing was more valuable than her dwelling and domestic artistry?.. I wanted to go out and do things--write books, speak out. I've been driven by that. I don't know how to rest in myself very well, how to be content staying put. But Mother knows how to BE at home--and really, to be in herself. It's actually very beautiful what she does.. I think part of me just longs for the way Mother experiences home. Sue Monk Kidd

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that. Sue Monk Kidd

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

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. (Matt 6:6) Sue Monk Kidd

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

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 piss and June's. That's what i thought when I looked at the dark circle on the ground. Piss is Piss. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

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

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

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

My mother's life was way too heavy for me. Sue Monk Kidd

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 stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example? Sue Monk Kidd

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, “I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.” It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it? . Sue Monk Kidd

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 question, but not yet."" The time to assert one's right is when it's denied! Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

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 one secret thing at the heart of it all. Kneeling on the floor, unable to stop shuddering, I heard it plainly. It said, You are unlovable... Sue Monk Kidd

To condemn slavery was one thing–that I could do in my own individual heart–but female ministers! Sue Monk Kidd

It takes so much energy to keep things at bay. Sue Monk Kidd

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 wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward. Sue Monk Kidd

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 unifying one's heart, mind, soul and feet around a decision. Sue Monk Kidd

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

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. Sue Monk Kidd

I can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

By law, a slaw was three-fifths of a person. It came to me that what I’d just suggested would seem paramount to proclaiming vegetables equal to animals, animals equal to humans, women equal to men, men equal to angels. I was upending the order of creation. Strangest of all, it was the first time thoughts of equality had entered my head, and I could only attribute it to God, with whom I’d lately taken up and who was proving to be more insurrectionary than law-abiding. . Sue Monk Kidd

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

It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back. Sue Monk Kidd

Look at her good, Lily, " she said, "'cause you're seeing the end of something."" I am?"" Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark." August stared at the sky a long moment and then, turning toward the house, said, "Now it won't ever be the same, not after they've landed up there and walked around on her. She'll be just one more science project. Sue Monk Kidd

Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.'' Good night, ' I said, and rolled onto my side.' There is nothing perfect, ' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life. Sue Monk Kidd

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

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

You've been halfway living your life for too long. May was saying that when it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid. Sue Monk Kidd

This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source. Sue Monk Kidd

And when you get down to it, Lily, that is the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love but to persist in love. Sue Monk Kidd

And whatever it is that keeps widening your heart that's Mary too not only the power inside you but the love. And when you get down to it Lily that's the only purpose grand enough for a human life. Not just to love - but to persist in love. Sue Monk Kidd

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 Sue Monk Kidd

I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn. Sue Monk Kidd

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me. Sue Monk Kidd

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. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart. Sue Monk Kidd

There's a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of 'soul force' - something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you identify your inner genius, you will be able to take action, whether it's writing a check or digging a well. Sue Monk Kidd

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. Sue Monk Kidd

We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way. Sue Monk Kidd

I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late. Sue Monk Kidd