110+ Sue Monk Kidd Quotes On Religion, Education And Longings

Sue Monk Kidd is an American writer, most known for her novel The Secret Life of Bees. She is also the author of The Invention of Wings, The Mermaid Chair, and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. Her work often focuses on themes of women's spirituality, self-discovery, and the quest for personal freedom. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sue Monk Kidd on religion, education, life.

Top 10 Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

1. Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.
2. ... in the end, Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in female form.
3. All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.
4. Sunset is the saddest light there is.
5. I found that I could not climb my way up to God in a blaze of doing and performing. Rather, I had to descend into the depths of myself and find God there in the darkness of troubled waters.
6. I have noticed that if you look carefully at people's eyes the first five seconds they look at you, the truth of their feelings will shine through for just an instant before it flickers away.
7. If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.
8. Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.
9. That's the sacred intent of life, of God--to move us continuously toward growth, toward recovering all that is lost and orphaned within us and restoring the divine image imprinted on our soul.
10. It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.

Sue Monk Kidd Short Quotes

• Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.
• Make the world better. Take the meanness out of people's hearts.
• It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.
• Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work.
• The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
• What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.
• We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.
• In a way, humans are not made of skin and bones as such, as we're made of stories.
• Nobody should go through life without falling in love.
• To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.

Sue Monk Kidd Quotes About Life

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

some things don't matter much. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart--now, that matters. The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters. — Sue Monk Kidd

It's easy to operate under the illusion that what we are doing is so important we cannot stop doing it. ... Stopping is a spiritual act. It is the refuge where we drink life in. — Sue Monk Kidd

To be fully human, fully myself, To accept all that I am, all that you envision, This is my prayer. Walk with me out to the rim of life, Beyond security. Take me to the exquisite edge of courage And release me to become. — Sue Monk Kidd

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it. — Sue Monk Kidd

Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about. — Sue Monk Kidd

Stopping is a spiritual art. It is the refuge where we drink life in. — Sue Monk Kidd

People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life. — Sue Monk Kidd

You gotta imagine what's never been. — 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

Sue Monk Kidd Quotes About Love

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

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

Grandmotherhood initiated me into a world of play, where all things became fresh, alive, and honest again through my grandchildren's eyes. Mostly, it retaught me love. — Sue Monk Kidd

Every little thing wants to be loved. — Sue Monk Kidd

It only meant that my natural inclination was to draw my "energy" from within instead of seeking it outside myself, plus my mom was an introvcert, and so were a lot of normal people. The problem was I was shy on top of that. And we all know how the world loves a shy introvert. — Sue Monk Kidd

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it? — Sue Monk Kidd

If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts. — Sue Monk Kidd

Actually, you can be bad at something...but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright — 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

Whatever else you do, listen to your Deepest Self. Love Her and be true to Her, speak Her truth, always. — Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd Quotes About Longings

The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't. — Sue Monk Kidd

When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons. Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly. — Sue Monk Kidd

I felt a trembling along my skin, a treaveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't. — 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

Sue Monk Kidd Quotes About Dying

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

People in general would rather die than forgive. It's THAT hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin. — Sue Monk Kidd

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

People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard. — Sue Monk Kidd

Honeybees depend not only on physical contact with the colony, but also require it's social companionship and support. Isolate a honeybee from her sisters and she will soon die. — Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd Famous Quotes And Sayings

The most significant gifts are the ones most easily overlooked. Small, everyday blessings: woods, health, music, laughter, memories, books, family, friends, second chances, warm fireplaces, and all the footprints scattered throughout our days. — Sue Monk Kidd

What has happened to our ability to dwell in the unknowing, to live inside a question and coexist with the tensions of uncertainty? Where is our willingness to incubate pain and let it birth something new? What has happened to patient unfolding, to endurance? These things are what form the ground of waiting. — 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

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife? — Sue Monk Kidd

Disconnected from my feminine soul, I had also unknowingly forfeited my power to name sacred reality. I had simply accepted what men had named. Neither had I noticed that when women give this power away, it is rarely used to liberate and restore value to women. More often it is used to shore up and enhance the privileged position of men. — Sue Monk Kidd

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and its accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through anothers eyes or heart. — 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

The translucence that comes when life hardens into a bead of such cruel perfection you see it with the purest clarity. Everything suddenly there--life as it truly is, enormous, appalling, devastating. You see the great sinkholes it makes in people and the harrowing lengths to which love will go to fill them. — Sue Monk Kidd

all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — 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

You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you. — Sue Monk Kidd

So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith. — Sue Monk Kidd

the feminine journey is a story unfolding, and its epiphanies come through real things, through tangibles like walking sticks and dreams and deer antlers--all of which we might miss without taking time and space in Deep Being. — Sue Monk Kidd

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression. — 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

To fashion an inner story of our pain carries us into the heart of it, which is where rebirth inevitably occurs. — Sue Monk Kidd

There's a gap somehow between empathy and activism. 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

Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and remind you who you could be with a little work. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

It is the peculiar nature of the world to go on spinning no matter what sort of heartbreak is happening. — Sue Monk Kidd

Now and then sprays of rain flew over and misted our faces. Every time I refused to wipe away the wetness. It made the world seem so alive to me. I couldn't help but envy the way a good storm got everyone's attention. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together. — 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

I eventually found that the soul is more than an immortal commodity to win and save. It is the repository of the inner divine, the truest part of us. — Sue Monk Kidd

The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence. — Sue Monk Kidd

I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of the ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realize how it had comforted me. Quiteness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums. — Sue Monk Kidd

I realize that I can be with someone, but on a deeper level I'm not available to them at all. I have attention deficit disorder of the soul. — Sue Monk Kidd

Journal became a sanctuary where I could pour out in honesty my pain and joy. It recorded my footsteps and helped me understand where I was standing, where I had been, and even where God pointed. — Sue Monk Kidd

I felt someone should personally thank every rock out there for the human misery it had absorbed. We should kiss them one by one & say, we are sorry, but something strong & lasting had to do this for May, & you are the chosen ones. God bless your rock hearts. — Sue Monk Kidd

Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness.....I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman -- precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility. — Sue Monk Kidd

In the photograph by my bed my mother 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

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing. — 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

You can't stop your heart from loving, really -- it's like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop. — Sue Monk Kidd

We must err , do so on the side of audacity — Sue Monk Kidd

"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer." "That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them." "Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been." — Sue Monk Kidd

The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage. — Sue Monk Kidd

This is the autumn of wonders, yet every day, every single day, I go back to that burned afternoon in August when T. Ray left. I go back to that one moment when I stood in the driveway with small rocks and clumps of dirt around my feet and looked back at the porch. And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me. — Sue Monk Kidd

What matters is giving over to what you love. — Sue Monk Kidd

How often do we do that, he wondered--look at someone and fail to see what's really there? — Sue Monk Kidd

Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is. — Sue Monk Kidd

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer. — 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 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. — Sue Monk Kidd

The time to assert one's right is when it's denied! — Sue Monk Kidd

Into every life a little rain must fall. — Sue Monk Kidd

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside — 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 & flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms & clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones. — Sue Monk Kidd

I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home. — Sue Monk Kidd

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair. — Sue Monk Kidd

This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away. — Sue Monk Kidd

In Radical Optimism, Beatrice Bruteau sets forth a deep and shining vision of spirituality, one that guides the reader into the contemplative life and the very root of our being. Dr. Bruteau is a philosopher of great measure whose work should be required reading for all who seek the deepest truth about themselves. — Sue Monk Kidd

I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it? — Sue Monk Kidd

Our earlier lives aren't wrong, they are just pre-construction. Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that's good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place. — Sue Monk Kidd

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality ... just be what it is. — Sue Monk Kidd

I sit in my new room and write everything down. My heart never stops talking. — Sue Monk Kidd

History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own. — 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

And I was struck all at once how life was out there going through its regular courses, and I was suspended, waiting, caught in a terrible crevice between living my life and not living it. — Sue Monk Kidd

It was the first time I'd ever said the words to another person, and the sound of them broke open my heart. — Sue Monk Kidd

Betrayal of any kind is hard, but betrayal by one's religion is excruciating. It makes you want to rage and weep. — Sue Monk Kidd

The world depends upon the small beating in your heart. — Sue Monk Kidd

After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it. — Sue Monk Kidd

Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time. — Sue Monk Kidd

Sometimes, in order to say yes to what matters most, I must say no to good things. — Sue Monk Kidd

I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they're capable of. At forty-two I'd never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem - my chronic inability to astonish myself. — 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

Life Lessons by Sue Monk Kidd

1. Sue Monk Kidd's work emphasizes the importance of self-discovery and the power of resilience. She encourages readers to stay true to themselves and to never give up in the face of adversity.
2. Through her writing, Kidd also encourages readers to explore their own spirituality and to find a sense of connection with the divine.
3. Finally, Kidd's work serves as a reminder that everyone has the potential to make a difference in the world, no matter how small.