Sue Monk Kidd Quotes - Page 4

What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.

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.

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

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.

It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey.

So few people know what they're capable of.

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

A moment of grace. There rose up within me a profound sense of being loved. I felt "gathered together" and encircled by a Presence completely loving, as if I were enveloped by the music of a love song created just for me. It was not overwhelming or even emotional. Just a warm knowing that I was in God's loving embrace...centered and unified there. [Love]encounters cannot be analyzed, only shared. If you take a butterfly, Robert Frost said, and pin it down into a box, you no longer have a butterfly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Regrets don't help anything.

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.

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think.

There is nothing perfect...only life.

For me, creativity is essentially a spiritual experience, a conversation between my soul and me.

You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough.

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 to something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.

Soul. The word rebounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I'd pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person--a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person's experiences--a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we've ever known.

In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.

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

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.

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.