Sue Monk Kidd
Most people don't have any idea about all the complicated life going on inside a hive. Bees have a secret life we don't know anything about.Collection: Ideas
I felt a trembling along my skin, a treaveling current that moved up my spine, down my arms, pulsing out from my fingertips. I was practically radiating. The body knows things a long time before the mind catches up to them. I was wondering what my body knew that I didn't.Collection: Long
I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.Collection: Spiritual
The world depends upon the small beating in your heart.Collection: Heart
I realize what a strange in-between place I am in. The Young Woman inside has turned to go, but the Old Woman has not shown up.Collection: Strange
We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.Collection: Writing
Into every life a little rain must fall.Collection: Inspirational
I wished she'd been smart enough, or loving enough, to realize everybody has burdens that crush them, only they don't give up their children.Collection: Crush
It shocks me how I wish for...what is lost and cannot come back.Collection: Wish
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.Collection: Heart
We must err , do so on the side of audacityCollection: Audacity
Look, I know you meant well creating the world and all, but how could you let it get away from you like this? How come you couldn't stick with your original idea of paradise? People's lives were a mess.Collection: Ideas
This is what I know about myself. She was all I wanted. And I took her away.Collection: Wanted
In the photograph by my bed my mother 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.Collection: Mother
At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin. I watched their wings shining like bits of chrome in the dark and felt the longing build in my chest. The way those bees flew, not even looking for a flower, just flying for the feel of the wind, split my heart down its seam.Collection: Wall
Gazing into the mirror, I saw myself as I was-a black silhouette in the room, a woman whose darkness had completely leaked through.Collection: Mirrors
I missed Rosaleen's snoring the way you'd miss the sound of the ocean waves after you've gotten used to sleeping with them. I didn't realize how it had comforted me. Quiteness has a strange, spongy hum that can nearly break your eardrums.Collection: Ocean
Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.' 'Good night,' I said, and rolled onto my side. 'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life.Collection: Good Night
In a weird way I must have loved my little collection of hurts and wounds. They provided me with some real nice sympathy, with the feeling I was exceptional... What a special case I was.Collection: Hurt
Disconnected from my feminine soul, I had also unknowingly forfeited my power to name sacred reality. I had simply accepted what men had named. Neither had I noticed that when women give this power away, it is rarely used to liberate and restore value to women. More often it is used to shore up and enhance the privileged position of men.Collection: Reality
People, in general, would rather die than forgive. It's that hard.Collection: People
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.Collection: Acceptance
As long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark.Collection: Strong
Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long.Collection: Real
Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.Collection: Looks
People in general would rather die than forgive. It's THAT hard. If God said in plain language. "I'm giving you a choice, forgive or die," a lot of people would go ahead and order their coffin.Collection: Order
My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period.Collection: Voice
If you aren't giving people something to talk about, you've become too dull.Collection: People
The whole problem with people is they don't know what matters and what doesn't.Collection: What Matters
The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.Collection: Boxing
After you get stung, you can't get unstung no matter how much you whine about it.Collection: Matter
You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.Collection: Thinking
You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves insideCollection: Mother
I know you've run away - everybody gets the urge to do that some time - but sooner or later you'll want to go home.Collection: Running
From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.Collection: People
I realize that I can be with someone, but on a deeper level I'm not available to them at all. I have attention deficit disorder of the soul.Collection: Soul
You've 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.Collection: Ends
What's wrong with living in a dream world? You have to wake up.Collection: Dream
Nothing is fair in this world. You might as well get that straight right nowCollection: World
When it's time to die, go ahead and die, and when it's time to live, live. Don't sort-of-maybe live, but live like you're going all out, like you're not afraid.Collection: Like You
If someone should ask me, 'What does the soul do?' I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates. Those are its primary acts.Collection: Two
Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.Collection: Writing
It's something everybody wants-for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.Collection: Hurt
If you need something from somebody always give that person a way to hand it to you.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Prayer
Something deep in all of us yearns for God's beauty, and we can find it no matter where we are.Collection: Matter
Sometimes, in order to say yes to what matters most, I must say no to good things.Collection: What Matters
Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.Collection: Mean
There is no place so AWAKE and ALIVE as the edge of becoming.Collection: Alive