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.

Sue Monk Kidd

Categorized in : Like You Dies Not Afraid

all that paddling around in the alphabet soup of one's childhood, scooping up letters, hoping to arrange them into enlightening sentences that would explain why things had turned out the way they had. It evoked a certain mutiny in me.

paddling mutiny childhood

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.

dabs boxing giving

I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?

hurt two people

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

You can tell which girls lack mothers by the look of their hair.

girl mother hair

I marvel at how good I was before I met him, how I lived molded to the smallest space possible, my days the size of little beads that passed without passion through my fingers. So few people know what they're capable of. At forty-two I'd never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem - my chronic inability to astonish myself.

passion space two

I wondered what it was like to be inside her, just a curl of flesh swimming in the darkness, the quiet things that had passed between us.

curls swimming darkness

Still everyone, including the abbot, had said that he was running away from his grief. They'd had no idea what they were talking about. He'd cradled his grief, almost to the point of loving it. For so long he refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.

grief running talking

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.

spiritual profound years

You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let t... by Sue Monk Kidd

You have to know when to prod and when to be quiet, when to let things take their course.

courses knows quiet

At forty-two, I had never done anything that took my own breath away, and I suppose now that was part of the problem--my chronic inability to astonish myself. I promise you, no one judges me more harshly than I do myself; I caused a brilliant wreckage. Some say I fell from grace; they're being kind. I didn't fall. I dove.

judging two fall

We can't think of changing our skin color. Change the world - tha... by Sue Monk Kidd

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

skin-color skins thinking

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

august ifs enough

I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them?

kind wonder people

Where had I been that I didn't know about imaginary friends? I could see the point of it. How a lost part of yourself steps out and remind you who you could be with a little work.

steps lost littles

I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives." (from 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'.)

daughter war country

Madonna Kolbenschlag suggest that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, if she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance. I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence. This stance can be assumed from the inside or the outside. Whichever place we choose, the important thing is having the sustained will to be, act, and speak from the ground of our feminine souls.

denial important soul

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

empathy novel character

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.

thank-god heaven fall

There was nothing I hated worse than clumps of whispering girls who got quiet when I passed. I started picking scabs off my body and, when I didn't have any, gnawing the flesh around my fingernails until I was a bleeding wreck. I worried so much about how I looked and whether I was doing things right, I felt half the time I was impersonating a girl instead of really being me.

whispering girl half

I'd heard August say more than once, "If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you." T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.

august giving hands