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
I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast – a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can’t prop my eyes open anymore – sometimes rather late. – Sue Monk Kidd
I think the word ‘freedom’ is beautiful, not so much in its phonics, but just in the power of the word itself. – Sue Monk Kidd
I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s an evolution of the heart. – Sue Monk Kidd
I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer. – Sue Monk Kidd
I came to believe that my true identity goes beyond the outer roles I play. It transcends the ego. I came to understand that there is an Authentic ‘I’ within – an ‘I Am,’ or divine spark within the soul. – Sue Monk Kidd
I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn’t what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to. – 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
We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way. – Sue Monk Kidd
I’m always captivated by stories of women who find a way to be daring – misbehaving women. – Sue Monk Kidd
My stories have a deep spiritual core because I have a deep desire to understand things of the spirit, but yet I don’t think I’ve written these stories from any kind of specific religious agenda because I don’t think that would work. – Sue Monk Kidd
I can’t explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me. – Sue Monk Kidd
Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it. – Sue Monk Kidd
For me, writing a novel goes on for years, and the solitude goes on, too. It tends to swallow me at times. I know it’s a problem when my husband sends the dog in to retrieve me. – Sue Monk Kidd
Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, ‘Who’s choreographing this stuff?’ – Sue Monk Kidd
I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. – Sue Monk Kidd
There’s a gap somehow between empathy and activism. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of ‘soul force’ – something that emanates from a deep truth inside of us and empowers us to act. Once you identify your inner genius, you will be able to take action, whether it’s writing a check or digging a well. – Sue Monk Kidd
Here is where our real selfhood is rooted, in the divine spark or seed, in the image of God imprinted on the human soul. The True Self is not our creation, but God’s. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence. – Sue Monk Kidd
On weekends, I sit in a lounge chair on my balcony. I love to be outside when the weather’s right. I can stay there pretty much all day. – Sue Monk Kidd
Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work. – Sue Monk Kidd
I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she’d been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole. – Sue Monk Kidd
I eventually found that the soul is more than an immortal commodity to win and save. It is the repository of the inner divine, the truest part of us. – 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
