Quotes By Author: Sue Monk Kidd
“I would rove down the hallway to the front alcove where I could see the water in the harbor float to the ocean and the ocean roll on till it sloshed against the sky. Nothing could hold a glorybound picture of it.First time I saw it, my feet hopped in place and I lifted my hand over my head and danced. That’s when I got true religion. I didn’t know to call it religion back then, didn’t know Amen from what-when, I just knew something came into me that made me feel the water belonged to me. I would say, that’s my water out there.”
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“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.”
“I laid my palm on the second square – the woman in the field and the slaves flying in the air over her head. All that hope in the wind.”
“I stared at the trunks of books on the library floor, remembering the pangs I’d once had for a profession, for some purpose. The world had been such a beckoning place once.”
“They say in extreme moments time will slow, returning to its unmoving core, and standing there, it seemed as if everything stopped. Within the stillness, I felt the old, irrepressible ache to know what my point in the world might be. I felt the longing more solemnly than anything I’d ever felt, even more than my old innate loneliness. What came to me was the fleur de lis button in the box and the lost girl who’d put it there, how I’d twice carried it from Charleston to Philadelphia and back, carried it like a sad, decaying hope.”
“…he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.”
“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.”
“I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.””That doesn’t say much for the Lord.””It doesn’t say much for us, either.”
“Mauma didn’t fall again, though, and I reckoned God had lent me an ear, but maybe that ear wasn’t white, maybe the world had a colored God, too, or else it was mauma who kept her own self standing, who answered my prayer with the strength of her limbs and the grip of her heart. She never whimpered, never made a sound except some whisperings from her lips.”
“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.”
“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.”
“He’d gone to church for forty years and was only getting worse. It seemed like this should tell God something.”
“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.”
“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.”