Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

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Sue Monk Kidd

Profession : Writer

Birth : August 12, 1948

In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient.

Sue Monk Kidd

The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.

Sue Monk Kidd

With pencil, you can always erase.

Sue Monk Kidd

I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart.

Sue Monk Kidd

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

Sue Monk Kidd

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

Sue Monk Kidd

There's a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of 'soul force' - something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you identify your inner genius, you will be able to take action, whether it's writing a check or digging a well.

Sue Monk Kidd

I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'

Sue Monk Kidd

When compassion wakes up in us, we find ourselves more willing to become vulnerable, to take the risk of entering the pain of others.

Sue Monk Kidd

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

Sue Monk Kidd

Giving voice to marginalised characters is extremely important to me. I want to explore the pain of disenfranchisement, the social strata and boundaries we create and how to make them more permeable.

Sue Monk Kidd

Here is where our real selfhood is rooted, in the divine spark or seed, in the image of God imprinted on the human soul. The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence.

Sue Monk Kidd

Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work.

Sue Monk Kidd

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

Sue Monk Kidd

I think there must be a place inside of us where dreams go and wait their turn.

Sue Monk Kidd

I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities.

Sue Monk Kidd

I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she'd been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole.

Sue Monk Kidd

People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life.

Sue Monk Kidd

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

Sue Monk Kidd

As an adolescent, I went to charm school, where I learned to pour tea and relate to boys, which, as I recall, meant giving them the pickle jar to unscrew, whether it was too hard for me or not.

Sue Monk Kidd