Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

When you hit your 40s, you're walking around, and you realize, 'Oh, my God, men don't look at me anymore.' Or sometimes you can feel really good, and then you look in the mirror, and you're like, 'Oh, Jesus, that's my face now!' But I have tell you that something happened and shifted inside of me.

I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship, and you don't recognize yourself because you changed a lot about you.

I've never been in another kind of midlife crisis. I don't know what it feels like when you're through that, but I definitely feel that changing a few things, like being on a different label and having things kind of settle back into a sense of normality, helps to feel grounded.

You know, let a few years go by until I hit my midlife crisis. Then that can be documented on film.

You hear about these guys having midlife crises - I don't see that happening to me.

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

Only then, approaching my fortieth birthday, I made philosophy my life's work.

When I turned 40, subconsciously, life was a blank sheet. Before, it was disjointed, and I was very displaced and quite mad, but it was a brilliant time. Everyone thinks I must have been unhappy.

When I was in my 30s, I was at the end of a long-term relationship and going through a very hard time. I'd had about 15 different addresses and a series of relationships. I thought, 'It's time to have a look at yourself.'

I don't feel like a 40-year-old. I feel more like four 10-year-olds, each pulling in a different direction.

I cried when I turned 34 for no other reason than 34 sounded old to me at the time.

In 2013, I didn't work at all, just contemplating what I needed to do, whether I was walking in my destiny or not.

There came a moment in my life when I realized that I had stepped into another part of my life. I used to walk into a room full of people and think, do they like me? And one day I walk in and I thought, do I like them?

When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else.

Somebody talked me into writing an autobiography about six or seven years ago. And I said I'd try. We talked into a tape recorder, and after a couple of months, I said, To hell with it. I was so depressed. It was like saying, 'This is the end.' I was more interested in what the hell was coming the next day or the next week.

I think it actually started in my late thirties. I started changing psychologically, and it was difficult to translate that into my writing.

A lot of people like me, who've been around for years and years and years, only really lose it in their forties and fifties.

By 30, I was separated from my husband, and I clearly remember sitting in my lovely office with a magnificent view, staring at a very lucrative pay stub, and bursting into tears because I was just miserable. So I had to make a decision: Keep following my plan, or be honest with myself and search for my true passion.

The characters that I'm typically drawn to are sensitive men who are experiencing some sense of identity crisis or growth in their life that they don't know how to overcome.

Writing my first book, 'Beautiful,' was the time that I was able to write the truth of it - that I was despairing at times, that I got depressed and felt like I couldn't cope. Writing became about being honest.

Midlife is a time of explosive change, when our hormones rampage and our bodies alter, forcing us into a whole new chapter of life whether we want it or not. Everyone has a moment when they realise for sure that this so-called passage of time is changing them - and perhaps not in a good way.

An 'Ordinary Woman' is the beautiful and achingly poignant portrait of Gwen, a complex and troubled woman in her middle years.

At 33 years old, I didn't have to work anymore. I had to search through 'What am I going to do for the rest of my life?' I wasn't ready to fly-fish for the rest of my life.

You are taught about puberty and the menopause and how tough they can be, but a quarter-life crisis, you're not prepared for.

I've gone through three changes- I thought I was a Christian then I was the devil then the third one, where I know who I am you know I feel like I'm an alien.