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Sue Monk Kidd

Sue Monk Kidd Books

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“I saw a shiny film, across her eyes - the beginning of tears. Looking into her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold, or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you. I felt like we were all adrift in the world, and all we had was the wet fire in August's eyes. But it was enough.”

SoulGriefEmotionMetaphorConnection With PeopleDescriptive WritingWarmth Of Love
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“The transfiguration of anger is a movement from rage to outrage. Rage implies an internalized emotion, a tempest within, Rage, or what might be called untrasnfigured anger, can become a calcified bitterness. What rage wants and needs is to move outward toward positive social purpose, to become a creative force or energy… Outrage is love’s wild and unacknowledged sister.”

SpiritualWomenHealingFeminismEmotionsRaptureWildnessDivinefeminine
Book:The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine
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“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.”

HomeMotherhood
Author:Sue Monk Kidd
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“Genuine compassion cannot be imposed from without. It doesn't happen simply by hearing a sermon on love, or being sent on a loving mission. How often have we set out to love to world—or even more difficult, to love some tiresome, undeserving, mule-headed person on our street—and given up, feeling exasperated, unappreciated, used, tired, burned out, or just plain cynical? The point is, you don't arbitrarily make up your mind to be compassionate so much as you choose to follow a journey that transforms your heart into a compassionate space.”

Compassion
Book:Firstlight: The Early Inspirational Writings of Sue Monk Kidd
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“The month of August had turned into a griddle where the days just lay there and sizzled. I plucked leaves off the elephant ear plants and fanned my face, sat with my bare feet submerged in the trickling water, felt breezes lift off the river and sweep over me, and still everything about me was stunned and stupefied by the heat, everything except my heart. It sat like an ice sculpture in the center of my chest. Nothing could touch it.”

HeartNatureWindAutumnRiverAugustNumbnessDescriptive WritingHot Weather
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“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?”

EmpathySlaveryEquality
Book:The Invention of Wings
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“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.”

FeelingsNatureBeauty
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“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.”

InspirationalSpiritualityFeminismGoddess
Book:The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine
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“I started to say, So then, what about the bracelet? but I could see he'd already given his answer, and it caused a kind of sorrow to rise in me that felt fresh and tender and had nothing, really, to do with the bracelet. I think now it was sorrow for the sound of his fork scraping the plate, the way it swelled in the distance between us, how I was not even in the room.”

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Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“Look at you child, look what he's done to you," she said. My knees had been tortured like this enough times in my life that I'd stopped thinking of it as out of the ordinary; it was just something you had to put up with from time to time, like the common cold. But suddenly the look on Rosaleen's face cut through all that. Look what he's done to you.”

RealityFocusMetaphor For LifeThe Secret Life Of BeesSue Monk KiddPolysemous
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“Sssh,’ she said, waving her hand. I had to get the news from the TV man. ‘Today, July second, 1964,’ he said, ‘the president of the United States signed the Civil Rights Act into law in the East Room of the White House…’ I looked over at Rosaleen, who sat there shaking her head, mumbling, ‘Lord have mercy,’ just looking so disbelieving and happy, like people on television when they have answered the $64,000 Question. I didn’t know whether to be excited for her or worried. All people ever talked about after church were the Negroes and whether they’d get their civil rights.”

PresidentWhite HouseCivil Rights Act Of 1964Lyndon B Johnson
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“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.”

InspirationalHopeDreamsMagicSlavery Quotes
Book:The Invention of Wings
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“In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was always complaining how text answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, ‘Give me a break.’ In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that’s just my opinion.”

TroublesSixth GradeSecret ThoughtsSteel Plate
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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“You could say I'd never had a true religious moment, the kind where you know yourself spoken to by a voice that seems other than yourself, spoken to so genuinely you see the words shining on trees and clouds. But I had such a moment right then, standing in my own ordinary room. I heard a voice say, Lily Melisa Owens, your jar is open. In a matter of seconds I knew exactly what I had to do --leave.”

Life LessonsCourageSelf PreservationThe Secret Life Of BeesSue Monk Kidd
Book:The Secret Life of Bees
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