You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the potential within each person and the transformative impact of new experiences on one's life.
In this quote, Sue Monk Kidd expresses a realization about her past self, where she lived a limited existence devoid of passion and true fulfillment. She highlights the importance of stepping out of one's comfort zone to discover what one is truly capable of, suggesting that many people, like herself, may not realize their full potential until they experience life in a more profound and transformative way. This insight emphasizes the need for personal growth and the quest for experiences that truly inspire and astonish us.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about personal growth, this quote can inspire individuals to challenge their limits.
More from Sue Monk Kidd
All quotes →Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
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?
I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over a million times daily--choosing love, then choosing it again...how loving and being in love could be so different.
Where do you come from?"...This is the number one most-asked question in all of South Carolina. We want to know if you are one of us, if your cousin knows our cousin, if your little sister went to school with our big brother, if you go to the same Baptist church as our ex-boss. We are looking for ways our stories fit together.
Back in the autumn I had awakened to a growing darkness and cacophony, as if something in the depths were crying out. A whole chorus of voices. Orphaned voices. They seemed to speak for all the unlived parts of me, and they came with a force and dazzle that I couldn't contain. They seemed to explode the boundaries of my existence. I know now that they were the clamor of a new self struggling to be born.
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No true and permanent fame can be founded, except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind.
I tell young people: Do not think of yourself, think of others. Think of the future that awaits you, think about what you can do and do not fear anything.
You have to grab moments when they happen. I like to improvise and ad lib.
I long for a kind of quiet where I can just drift and dream. I always say getting inspiration is like fishing. If you're quiet and sitting there and you have the right bait, you're going to catch a fish eventually. Ideas are sort of like that. You never know when they're going to hit you.
God doesn't care nearly as much about where you have been as He does about where you are and, with His help, where you are willing to go.
Just strengthening that theme that America is a place of opportunity and hoping to inspire people to fulfill those opportunities, and to want more, and to want better, and to see the places we can go. So many people identify with me because of the place that I come from.