Sue Monk Kidd Writing Quotations

It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

I've always been a journal-keeper. I've always tried to write about how I'm experiencing life, and my feelings and thoughts.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

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 sit in my new room and write everything down. My heart never stops talking.

There's a gap somehow between empathy and activism. 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.

Have you ever written a letter you knew you could never mail but you needed to write it anyway?

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.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.