Sue Monk Kidd

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.

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...

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!

The past week, Mother had denied her a pass to the market for some minor, forgettable reason, and she__ taken it hard. Her market excursions were the acme of her days, and trying to commiserate, I'd said, __'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. __o 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?

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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)

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

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

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.

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

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.