The collection / 98 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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02c. 1948 AD

One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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03c. 1948 AD

...Mary, fresh with feminist appropriations, has the potential to undergird women’s reformations.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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04c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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05c. 1948 AD

You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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06c. 1948 AD

Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right now

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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07c. 1948 AD

...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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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08c. 1948 AD

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

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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09c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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10c. 1948 AD

Depressed people do things they wouldn't ordinarily do.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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11c. 1948 AD

There would be no grand absolution, only forgiveness meter out in these precious sips. I would well up from Hugh's heart in spoonfuls, and he would feed it to me. And it would be enough.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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12c. 1948 AD

You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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13c. 1948 AD

In the photograph by my bed my other is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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14c. 1948 AD

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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15c. 1948 AD

I said out loud, "Damn you for saving yourself. How come you left me with nothing but to love you and hate you, and that's gonna kill me, and you know it is."Then I turned round, went back to the cellar room, and picked up the sewing.Don't think she wasn't in every stitch I worked. She was in the wind and the rain and the creaking from the rocker. She sat on the wall with the birds and stared at me. When darkness fell, she fell with it.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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16c. 1948 AD

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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17c. 1948 AD

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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18c. 1948 AD

I believe in the goodness of imagination.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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19c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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20c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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21c. 1948 AD

All my life, in nameless, indeterminate ways, I'd tried to complete my life with someone else--first my father, then Hugh, even Whit, and I didn't want that anymore. I wanted to belong to myself.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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22c. 1948 AD

I wonder if that's the perennial story of writers: you find the true light, you lose the true light, you find it again. And maybe again.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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23c. 1948 AD

I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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24c. 1948 AD

Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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