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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Spinners take out the bad stuff, leave in the good. I’ve always thought how nice it would be to have spinners like this for human beings. Just toss them in and let the spinner do its work.”

“There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. 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 me.”

“She liked to tell everyone that women make the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting.”

“When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small?”

“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.”

“It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“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.”

“Egg laying is the main thing, Lily. She's the mother of every bee in the hive, and they all depend on her to keep it going. I don't care what their job is--they know the queen is their mother. She's the mother of thousands.”

“Standing there, I loved myself and I hated myself. That's what the black Mary did to me, made me feel my glory and my shame at the same time.”

“June always said that most people bit off more than they could chew, but August chewed more than she bit off.”

“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.”

“People who think dying is the is the worst thing don't know a thing about life.”

“You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards" -Secret Life of the Bees”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I feel again the hunger to let go of my striving and find the ability to become content and still, intentionally "superfluous," as writer Helen M. Luke puts it. I want a refuge from my old conquering self.”

“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 can't think of anything I'd rather have more than somebody lovin' me.”

“I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.”

“I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.”

“You gotta imagine what's never been.”

“There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.”

“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.”

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

“It was the oldest sound there was. Souls flying away.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional...What a special case I was.”

“I didn't know then what I wanted, but the ache for it was palpable.”

“There is a fullness of time for things. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet. When to let things take their course.”

“We walked along the river with the words streaming behind us like ribbons in the night.”

“Place a beehive on my grave and let the honey soak through, when I am 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 grave and let the honey soak through.”

“All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.”

“I believe in the goodness of imagination.”

“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.”