Sue Monk Kidd

“Place a beehive on my graveAnd let the honey soak through.When I'm dead and gone,That's what I want from you.The streets of heaven are gold and sunny,But I'll stick with my plot and a pot of honey.Place a beehive on my graveAnd let the honey soak through.”

“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.”

“He'd gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.”

“Regrets don't help anything.”

“T. Ray said 'Who do you think you are? Julias Shakespeare?' The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival.”

“There is nothing perfect...there is only life.”

“People start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.”

“the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin”

“I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being one.”

“Ich hatte schon oft gehoert wie Augusta gesagt hatte: Wenn du etwas vom jemanden brauchst dann bau dem anderen eine Bruecke auf der ihr euch begegnen koennt.”

“Aber sie sagte immer dass Frauen einfach die besseren Imkerinen seien weil ihnen die besondere Faehigkeit angeboren sei Kreaturen zu lieben die ihnen wehtun.”

“Ich beneidete die Schildkroeten um ihre Panzer in denen sie jederzeit verschwinden konnten.”

“From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I pulled out my bag and examined my mother's picture. I wondered what it had been like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in her darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.”

“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.”

“How often do we do that, he wondered--look at someone and fail to see what's really there?”

“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.”

“...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.”

“Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it.”

“Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.”

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

“The mermaids came to me finally, in the pink hours of my life. They are my consolation. For them I dove with arms outstretched, my life streaming out behind me, a leap against all proprieties and expectations, but a leap that was somehow saving and necessary. How can I ever explain or account for that? I dove, and a pair of invisible arms simply appeared, unstinting arms, like the musculature of grace suddenly revealing itself. They caught me after I hit the water, bearing me not to the surface but to the bottom, and only then pulling me up.”

“I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they’re being kind. I didn’t fall – I dove.”

“Water beaded across her shoulders, shining like drops of milk, and her breasts swayed in the currents. It was the kind of vision you never really get over. I couldn’t help it, I wanted to go and lick the milk beads from her shoulders. I opened my mouth. I wanted something. Something, I didn’t know what. Mother, forgive.”

“Did this mean if I told May about T. Ray's mounds of grits, his dozens of small cruelties, about my killing my mother--that hearing it, she would feel everything I did? 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?”

“He will use the word "love", and the world will not stop spinning but go right on in its courses, like the river, like the bees, like everything.”

“People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It's your time to live, don't mess it up.”

“It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.”

“I now understand that writing fiction was a seed planted in my soul, though I would not be ready to grow that seed for a long time.”

“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.”

“Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.”

“We are surrounded on all sides by God but often we are no more conscious of him than we are of air pressing against us. We don't turn our attention to Him. (Evelyn Underhill)”

“God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. (Nicolas of Cusa)”

“My mother was a good Catholic -- she went to mass twice a week at St. Mary's in Richmond, but my father was an Orthodox Eclectic.”

“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.”

“Solitude is a time for "God and God alone." Who knows what can happpen when we focus only on God. In solitude, we sense our deep oneness with God and keep company with Him. Solitude is breaking through my isolation into sharing and being in touch with my Creator. In fact, we can begin to heal our loneliness by transforming it into solitude.”

“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)”

“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.”

“You can go other places, all right - you can live on the other side of the world, but you can't ever leave home”

“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.”

“A spiritual pilgrim needs to discern when his or her life is stunted in an old field and find the courage and determination to go to a "new land" that the Lord will show. (Abraham-Journey) ...so that you can find the wholeness you seek.”