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7200c36
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My mauma was shrewd. She didn't get any reading and writing like me. Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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d70ee32
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in the end, Goddess is just a word. It simply means the divine in female form.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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cd66c1f
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The road of 'God alone' struck me with unsettling fear. So I lingered in a kind of limbo. Unable to go back, unable to go on. Uncertain. Tentative. How strange that we tend to stand ankle-deep in the spiritual life even though the grounding depth of intimacy with God is the most nourishing experience of our lives and affirms our very being!
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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380cb63
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This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source.
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feminine-source
remembering
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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46e1c21
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It's part of our overall Body Negation Program.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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110735a
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What matters is giving over to what you love.
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love
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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8559b43
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There's a fullness of time for things, Lily. You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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04d44bc
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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?
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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726598a
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Yet I remember the rule I set for myself-that I do something different from my mother. . . I started to believe I couldn't really do that if I was following in the path of either of my parents... That so-called rule helped me separate more fully from my mother and father, I realize, but maybe it also kept me from seeing what was right in front of me.
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Sue Monk Kidd & Ann Kidd Taylor |
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9d2dedf
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I learned how easy it is to give up and become draperies while everyone else is dancing.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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01c6454
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Readiness for dying arrives by attending the smallest moment and finding the eternal inside of it.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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94dc215
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This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.
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the-secret-life-of-bees
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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780f03e
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She used to say, you got to figure out which end of the needle you're gon be, the one that's fastened to the thread or the end that pierces the cloth.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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9f71d7b
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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.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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c5222ac
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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.
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mothers
secrets
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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9e35edb
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She couldn't get free and she couldn't pop missus on the back of her head with a cane, but she could take her silk. You do your rebellions any way you can.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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c3d34e0
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God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world--but the fact those yearnings often come to nothing, well, I doubt that's God's doing." She cut her eyes at me and smiled. "I think we know that's men's doing." She leaned toward me. "Life is arranged against us, Sarah. And it's brutally worse for Handful and her mother and sister. We're all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren't we? I suspect God plants these year..
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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d0a974b
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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.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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f88b4c8
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She was wet with my crying. Up around her collar the cotton of her dress was plastered to her skin. I could see her darkness shining through the wet places. She was like a sponge, absorbing what I couldn't hold anymore.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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24650b7
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A worker bee is just over a centimeter long and weighs only about sixty milligrams; nevertheless, she can fly with a load heavier than herself.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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21dd3a0
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We walked to the woods beside the pink house with her stories still pulled soft around our shoulders. I could feel them touching me in places, like an actual shawl.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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7f7e163
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The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you never will outpace your grief.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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ca8ee1a
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Drawing a breath, I flung myself across the door sill. That was the artless way I navigated the hurdles of girlhood. Everyone thought I was a plucky girl, but in truth, I wasn't as fearless as everyone assumed. I had the temperament of a tortoise. Whatever dread, fright, or bump appeared in my path, I wanted nothing more than to drop in my tracks and hide. If you must err, do so on the side of audacity. That was the little slogan I'd devise..
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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0b438d6
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Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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1d13065
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Squeezing it in my palm, I prayed, Please, God, let this seed you planted in me bear fruit.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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cbe637f
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As writer Isak Dinesen put it, "All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them."
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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06e2023
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there is a seed of light inside of us, a mysterious Inner Voice.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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a19cf8b
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She say Fon people keep a spirit tree and it always be a Baybob. Your granny-mauma wrapped the trunk with thread she begged and stole. She took me out there and say, 'We gon put our spirits in the tree so they safe from harm.' We kneel on her quilt from Africa, nothing but a shred now, and we give our spirits to the tree. She say our spirits live in the tree with the birds, learning to fly. She told me, 'If you leave this place, go get your..
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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a31a13a
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It never occurred to her their gaiety wasn't contentment, but survival.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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133dbdf
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I heard mauma say, "I don't spec to get free. The only way I'm getting free is for you to get free."
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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d806906
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I want to tell you I'm strong and resolute, but in truth, I feel afraid and alone and uncertain. I feel as if he has died, and I suppose in some way it's true. I'm left with nothing but this strange beating in my heart that tells me I'm meant to do something in this world. I cannot apologize for it, or for loving this small beating as much as him.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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d4250b2
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For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the pale of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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1a4b240
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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.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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65f6002
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Lily Owens: If your favorite color is blue, why did you paint the house pink? August Boatwright: [chuckles] That was May's doing. When we went to the paint shop, she latched on to a color called, "Caribbean Pink." She said it made her feel like dancing a Spanish Flamenco. I personally thought it was the tackiest color I had ever seen, but I figured if it could lift May's heart, it was good enough to live in.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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fceaf18
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women internalize the feminine wound or feminine inferiority so deeply, there's little or no female authority and esteem to fall back on. So they seek it by adopting and pleasing patriarchal standards.
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patriarchy
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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41fac72
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This is a hard question. But as women we have a right to ask the hard questions. The only way I have ever understood, broken free, emerged, healed, forgiven, flourished, and grown powerful is by asking the hardest questions and then living into the answers through opening up to my own terror and transmuting it into creativity. I have gotten nowhere by retreating into hand-me-down sureties or resisting the tensions that truth ignited.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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a28d127
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Some things were not possible in this world. Children did not have two parents who refused to love them. One, maybe, but for pity's sake, not two.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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28385f3
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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.
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heaven-on-earth
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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64ddb47
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It'd been Lucy who ran tattling to Miss Mary about my lettering under the tree, and Miss Mary had run tattling to missus. I'd judged Lucy to be stupid, but she was only weak-willed and wanting to get in good with Miss Mary. I never did forgive her, and I don't know if Miss Sarah forgave her sister, cause what came from all that snitching turned the tide on Miss Sarah's life. Her studying was over and done.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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304b7cd
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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.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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659d02c
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I climbed into the honey wagon with my hair uncombed, with May handing me buttered toast and orange juice through the window and Rosaleen sticking in thermoses of water, both of them practically running alongside the truck while August rolled out of the driveway. I felt like the Red Cross springing to action to save the bee queendom.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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10c2683
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I only know there's something unsettling about a door that closes forever. I feel a vague lament about the changing of my body, the alterations in my appearance, the bleeding out of motherhood, the fear that I will not find the mysterious green fuse again.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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f82ba6f
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One day i will have to forgive life for ending. I tell myself I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality.....just be what ti is.
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Sue Monk Kidd |
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7252b11
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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, and the impassive way I'd treated them
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Sue Monk Kidd |