Sue Monk Kidd

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.

As long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark.

She didn't even know how dangerous the truth could be, all the tiny, shattering seeds it carried.

You have to find a mother inside yourself. We all do. Even if we already have a mother, we still have to find this part of ourselves inside

I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.

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.

There's nothing like a song about lost love to remind you how everything precious can slip from the hinges where you've hung it so careful.

I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.

All my life I've thought I needed someone to complete me, now I know I need to belong to myself.

When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self.

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.