Kidd Quotes & Sayings

Are you truly doing what's best for the nation, what's best for the Army, what's best for your unit, and what's best for your soldiers and their families? Are you taking all of that into consideration, or are you looking at what makes you as an individual look the best? — Richard A. Kidd

More than once, while staring at the wall, I'd thought of Our Lady. I wanted to talk to her, to say, Where do I go from here? But when I'd seen her earlier, when August and I had first come in, she didn't look like she could be of service to anybody, bound up with all that chain around her. You want the one you're praying to at least to look capable. I dragged myself out of bed and went to see her anyway. I decided that even Mary did not need to be one hundred percent capable all the time. The only thing I wanted was for her to understand. Somebody to let out a big sigh and say, You poor thing, I know how you feel. Given a choice, I preferred someone to understand my situation, even though she was helpless to fix it, rather than the other way around. But that's just me. Right — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

Nina was one wing, I was another
Sarah Grimke — Sue Monk Kidd

I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness. — Sue Monk Kidd

How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is. The — Sue Monk Kidd

I want to believe that while we may sometimes read in the misguided pursuit of preserving our separation, there is a greater impulse inside us that compels us to read in search of the common heart. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

I feel like we need to be aware of the ways we use and misuse religious dogma: whether it takes us deeper into love and inclusion or it separates us. — Sue Monk Kidd

One thing that became clear to me is that images of a divine mother are surprisingly important in the psychological wholeness of women, especially in the process of women taking up residence in their own authority. — Sue Monk Kidd

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.
Lily Owens: That was awfully nice of you.
August Boatwright: Well, I don't know. Some things in life, like the color of a house, don't really matter. But lifting someone's heart? Now, that matters. — Sue Monk Kidd

Hey, have you heard that one about the difference between me, Wit, and my loutish cousin, Hilarity? No? Okay, so I walk into a bar, you see, very unassuming, and order a martini. Then the bartender, Hilarity, hauls off and squirts me in the face with a seltzer bottle, ruining my n ice new camel hair suit, dousing my monocle and my watch fob, soaking my cravat. So, do I let him have what for, and blow my top? I do not. I simply say:
Sorry, I believe I said 'very dry'. — Chip Kidd

There is nothing perfect...only life. — Sue Monk Kidd

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 ... — Sue Monk Kidd

I was a Nancy Drew girl. Also Grimms' fairy tales. — Sue Monk Kidd

We are so limited, you have to use the same word for loving Rosaleen as you do for loving Coke with peanuts. Isn't that a shame we don't have many more ways to say it? — Sue Monk Kidd

We had a signal. When I turned the pail upside down by the kitchen house, that meant everything was clear. Mauma would open the window and throw down a taffy she stole from missus' room. Sometimes here came a bundle of cloth scraps - real nice calicos, gingham, muslin, some import linen. One time, that true brass thimble. Her favorite thing to take was scarlet-red thread. She would wind it up in her pocket and walk right out the house with it. — Sue Monk Kidd

'Traveling with Pomegranates' is a very personal, very honest story about my relationship with my daughter and Ann's with her mother. — Sue Monk Kidd

A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost - don't see it, don't hear it, but it's always hovering round on ready. — Sue Monk Kidd

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway? — Sue Monk Kidd

I'm a high-risk taker on the court in the sense of trying to squeeze things in there. — Jason Kidd

I think we're going in the right direction. — Jason Kidd

But at the end of the day, you can't major in Making Stuff, so it was Art by default. — Chip Kidd

A bag of bones can slip through small cracks in a crowd effortlessly. — Kris Kidd

Be consoled in knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart. — Sue Monk Kidd

I'm feeling like Billy the Kidd, skinny B.I.G.
You literally live like a guinea pig — Roc Marciano

Sometimes you want to fall on your knees and thank God in heaven for all the poor news reporting that goes on in the world. — Sue Monk Kidd

I gave them everything I had, and I guess it feels
alright.
I gave them my body,
and they use it every night. — Kris Kidd

The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.
If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds. — Sue Monk Kidd

The problem is [people] know what matters, but they don't choose it. — Sue Monk Kidd

Design is, literally, purposeful planning. Graphic Design, then, is the form those plans will take. — Chip Kidd

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - that's how we gotta think. — Sue Monk Kidd

I would like to be free of the part of me that dares too little and fears too much. — Sue Monk Kidd

Have you ever noticed the more you try not to think, the more elaborate your thinking episodes get? — Sue Monk Kidd

I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was. — Sue Monk Kidd

Every ghost has a story. Monsters are nothing without mythology. — Kris Kidd

I realize I'm trying to work out the boundaries. How to love her without interfering. How to step back and let her have her private world and yet still be an intimate part of it. When she talks about her feelings, I have to consciously tell myself she wants me to receive them, not fix them. — Sue Monk Kidd

I would rather my soul broil in hell than I do you any harm. — William Kidd

Which end of the needle are you going to be- the side held by string or the point that pierces the cloth? — Sue Monk Kidd

Watch now," Handful told her. "This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that's how you make a plait - hop over, hop under." Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she'd carved a Florentine statue. It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser. — Sue Monk Kidd

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves. — Sue Monk Kidd

At the age of eleven, I owned a slave I couldn't free.O — Sue Monk Kidd

It was respect she had for feelings, how she believed it was inimical to the soul to deny them. — Sue Monk Kidd

Our earlier lives aren't wrong, they are just pre-construction. Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that's good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place. — Sue Monk Kidd

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study. — Sue Monk Kidd

Passing is contagious. There's nothing better than making the pass that gives someone an easy hoop. — Jason Kidd

The thing that I came to realize was that Schulz is the great unifier. Here's the one cartoonist that pretty much everybody can agree on. — Chip Kidd

How did we ever get the idea that God would supply us on demand with quick fixes, that God is merely a rescuer and not a midwife? — Sue Monk Kidd

There is no shortage of well-known pirates, including: Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard, Blue beard, Yellowbeard, and Yellow beard with Black Roots, who surmised that, if blondes have more fun, then blond pirates must have a heck of a lot more fun. — Cuthbert Soup

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair ... — Sue Monk Kidd

. . Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us . . . if they only come to nothing? — Sue Monk Kidd

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? — Sue Monk Kidd

Whatever it is I'm born to do, my fear of failing at it has almost become greater than my desire to figure out what it is. — Ann Kidd Taylor

But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward. — Sue Monk Kidd

Aunt-Sister said Charleston had a case of the grandeurs. Up till I was eight or so, I thought the grandeurs was a shitting sickness. — Sue Monk Kidd

All I knew about bees when I started to write 'The Secret Life of Bees' was that they can live in a wall of your house, and that they make this incredible thing that I loved. — Sue Monk Kidd

You do your rebellions any way you can. — Sue Monk Kidd

Stories are amazing and powerful because they can resonate with people depending on their needs and experiences and speak truths we need to hear in that moment in time. — Sue Monk Kidd

The bees came the summer of 1964 — Sue Monk Kidd

August: You know, somethings don't matter that much ... like the color of a house ... But lifting a person's heart
now that matters. The whole problem with people

Lily: They don't know what matters and what doesn't ...
August: ... They know what matters, but they don't choose it ... The hardest thing on earth is to choose what matters. — Sue Monk Kidd

God is he whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

I didn't know for sure whether Miss Sarah's feelings came from love or guilt. I didn't know whether mine came from love or a need to be safe. She loved me and pitied me. And I loved her and used her. It never was a simple thing. — Sue Monk Kidd

And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father
the man holding the brush
and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't. — Sue Monk Kidd

They say you can bear anything if you can tell a story about it. — Sue Monk Kidd

It's easy to operate under the illusion that what we are doing is so important we cannot stop doing it ... Stopping is a spiritual act. It is the refuge where we drink life in. — Sue Monk Kidd

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience. — 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

I've always been a journal-keeper. I've always tried to write about how I'm experiencing life, and my feelings and thoughts. — Sue Monk Kidd

I marveled at how mixed up people got when it came to love. I myself, for instance. It seemed like I was now thinking of Zach forty minutes out of every hour, Zach, who was an impossibility. That's what I told myself five hundred times: impossibility. I can tell you this much: the word is a great big log throw on the fires of love. — Sue Monk Kidd

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

You put his brain in a bird, the bird would fly backwards -Secret Life of the Bees — Sue Monk Kidd

The business always gets in the way of basketball. — Jason Kidd

It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts. — Sue Monk Kidd

Championship teams are built on being prepared, playing unselfishly and being held accountable — Jason Kidd

From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac. — Sue Monk Kidd

I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place. — Sue Monk Kidd

I had got where I talked to her all the time. Like I would say, I didn't hear her talk back, so I hadn't lost my sanities. — Sue Monk Kidd

The idea of existing beyond the patriarchal institution of faith, of withdrawing our external projection of God onto the church is almost unfathomable ... We think there's nothing beyond the edge. No real spirituality, no salvation, no community, no divine substance. We cannot see that the voyage will lead us to whole new continents of depth and meaning. That if we keep going, we might even come full circle, but with a a whole new consciousness. — Sue Monk Kidd

Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness ... I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman
precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility. — Sue Monk Kidd

I'm a very slow reader. — Chip Kidd

I'd been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations. — Sue Monk Kidd

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

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

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. — Sue Monk Kidd

against my nature." He gave me a tired smile. "You — Sue Monk Kidd

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

My nose bleeds, and every comedown feels like an overdose. I try to make peace with God each time, but he shows no interest, and it reminds me of my dad, and I get so upset that I just have to do another line. Like I said, a cycle. — Kris Kidd

Actually, you can be bad at something ... but if you love doing it, that will be enough. - August Boatwright — Sue Monk Kidd

As long as you live under my roof, you'll do what I say!" he shouted.
Then I'll find another roof, I thought.
"You understand me?" he said.
"Yes sir, I understand" I said, and I did too. I understand that a new rooftop would do wonders for me. — Sue Monk Kidd

Sarah shifted on the bench. I worried she was winding up to say something, that Sky would start humming now, that the fright spring-coiled inside me would break loose. Then I remembered the widow dress I was wearing. I made a sound with my lips like I was trying to give him an answer, but choking on the words, seized by my grief, and I didn't have to pretend that much. I felt sorrow for my life, for what I'd lived and seen and known, for what was lost to me, and the weeping turned real. — Sue Monk Kidd

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

One time, that true brass thimble. — Sue Monk Kidd

Missus said I was the worst waiting maid in Charleston. She said, "You are abysmal, Hetty, abysmal." I asked Miss Sarah what abysmal means and she said, "Not quite up to standard." Uh huh. I could tell from missus' face, there's bad, there's worse, and after that comes abysmal. — Sue Monk Kidd

Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers. — Sue Monk Kidd

The fact is: our faith is more rational than the most elaborate paradigm of the atheistic foundationalist, more romantic than the wildest dreams of the unbelieving postmodernist. our faith is a dogma that makes you dance. — Reggie M. Kidd

I have come here not to find answers, but to find a way to live in a world without any. — 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

The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good ... These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice
how we relate to one another.
For instance, [Elizabeth A.] Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how "he crushes his enemies" and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive.
Likewise, if the key symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity. — Sue Monk Kidd

In a way, humans are not made of skin and bones as such, as we're made of stories. — Sue Monk Kidd