The collection / 98 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1948 AD

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get?

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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02c. 1948 AD

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

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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03c. 1948 AD

The pear trees were bare, their limbs spread open like the viscera of a parasol. Stretching into the darkness beyond, the single houses, double houses, and villas were lined up in cramped, neat rows which ran toward the tip of the peninsula. p94

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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04c. 1948 AD

When is the impulse to help an adult child a wise intervention and when is it self-serving and prying? I have an uneasy feeling I will have to carry the question around for a while like some grating pebble in my shoe.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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05c. 1948 AD

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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06c. 1948 AD

I was wishing I had a story like that one to live inside me with so much loudness you could pick it up on a stethoscope.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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07c. 1948 AD

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

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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08c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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09c. 1948 AD

Mr. Vesey, though, he didn't like any kind of talk about heaven. He said that was the coward’s way, pining for life in the hereafter, acting like this one didn’t mean a thing. I had to side with him on that.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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10c. 1948 AD

Don't be telling me--can't be done. That's some god damney white talk, that's what that is.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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11c. 1948 AD

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)

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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12c. 1948 AD

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

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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13c. 1948 AD

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.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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14c. 1948 AD

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting alone was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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15c. 1948 AD

I'd chosen the regret I could live with best, that's all. I'd chosen the life I belonged to.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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16c. 1948 AD

It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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17c. 1948 AD

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

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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18c. 1948 AD

My mother's life was way too heavy for me.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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19c. 1948 AD

Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example?

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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20c. 1948 AD

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she’d taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, “I'm sorry, Handful, I know how you must feel.” It seemed to me I did know what it felt to have one's liberty curtailed, but she blazed up at me. “So we just the same, me and you? That's why you the one to shit in the pot and I'm the one to empty it?

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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21c. 1948 AD

Angelina, I think of you as my friend, the dearest of friends, and it tortures me to go against you, but now is the time to stand with the slave. The time will come for us to take up the woman question, but not yet.""The time to assert one's right is when it's denied!

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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22c. 1948 AD

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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23c. 1948 AD

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...

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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24c. 1948 AD

To condemn slavery was one thing—that I could do in my own individual heart—but female ministers!

Sue Monk Kidd / quote

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