Quotes by Sue Monk Kidd

The energy or vitality to create is engendered from the soul.

 

...to start off she gave me a lesson in what she called "bee yard etiquette". She reminded me that the world was one big bee yard, and the same rules worked fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life loving bee want to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot, wear long sleeves and long pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you feel angry whistle. Anger agitates, while whistling melts a bees temper. Act like you know what you are doing, even if you don't. Above all, send the bees love. Every little thing wants to be loved.

 

"If you have the right kind of ears, you can listen to a hive and hear the Christmas story somewhere inside yourself. You can hear silent things on the other side of the everyday world that nobody else can.

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"

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.

"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer."
"That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them."
"Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been."

I said, "If I was a Negro girl—"
He placed his fingers across my lips so I tasted his saltiness. "We can't think of changing our skin," he said. "Change the world—that's how we gotta think."

"I wish you could've seen the Daughters of Mary the first time they laid eyes on this label. You know why? Because when they looked at her, it occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin. You see, everybody needs a God who looks like them, Lily."