The Book of Longings Quotes

“When I tell you all shall be well, I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. All shall be well, no matter what.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Anger is effortless. Kindness is hard. Try to exert yourself.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Lord our God, hear my prayer, the prayer of my heart. Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it. Bless my reed pens and my inks. Bless the words I write. May they be beautiful in your sight. May they be visible to eyes not yet born. When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“I think every pain in this world wants to be witnessed.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“We will teach you about our God and you will teach us about yours, and together we'll find the God that exists behind them.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Each of us must find a way to love the world. You have found yours.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Bless the largeness inside me, no matter how I fear it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“I tried for so long to belong, to be as they needed me to be. Now I wish to be myself.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Why should we contain God any longer in our poor and narrow conceptions, which are so often no more than grandiose reflections of ourselves? Let us set him free.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Your moment will come because you'll make it come.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Your moment will come, and when it does, you must seize it with all the bravery you can find.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Her mind was an immense feral country that spilled its borders.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“You'll be devastated and grief-stricken, but there's a place in you that is inviolate-it's the surest part of you, a piece of Sophia herself. You'll find your way there, when you need to. And you'll know then what I speak of.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“I went to stand beside him and looked in the same direction as he, and it seemed for an instant I saw the world as he did, orphaned and broken and staggeringly beautiful, a thing to be held and put back right.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Whenever the sky quaked, women uttered a blessing: Lord preserve me from the wrath of Lilith. But I could never bring myself to say it. I would whisper instead, Lord, bless the roaring”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Don't look away. Terrible things will happen now. Unbearable things. Bear it anyway.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Life will be life and death will be death.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“You think with your head. You know with your heart.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Of all the emotions, Hope was the most mysterious. It grew like the blue lotus, snaking up from muddy hearts, beautiful while it lasted.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“I tell you, there are times when words are so glad to be set free they laugh out loud and prance across their tablets and inside their scrolls.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“It does the world no good to return evil for evil. I try now to return good to them instead.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“He heard the quake that lived at my center, and he didn't seek to silence it.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“You said you're not like other men. Well, I'm not like other women-you've said so yourself. I have ambitions as men do. I'm racked with longings. I'm selfish and willful and sometimes deceitful. I rebel. I'm easy to anger. I doubt the ways of God. I'm an outsider everywhere I go. People look on me with derision. And you would still have me?”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“And it comes to me that the echoes of my own life will likely die away in that way thunder does. But this life, what a shining thing-it is enough.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“I will meet you in the place called Deathless, I whispered.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“Return to your longing. It will teach you everything.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings