Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

Victims always feel alone and helpless.

I was so ashamed of it that I would spend hours in the shower crying and trying to wash my skin off.

How I hated the dark part of me that continually foretold of failure or futility.

The gloom encroaches upon my mind, and my heart flutters like a bird held fast in a fist.

There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror. And then, next day, you didn't know what to make of it,you couldn't interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day before. Yes, you know what evil costs.

I am obsessed at nights with the idea of my own worthlessness, and if it were only to turn a light on to save my life I think I would not do it. These are the last footprints of a headache I suppose. Do you ever feel that? - like an old weed in a stream. What do you feel, lying in bed?

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.

Why is my needle stuck in childhood? I don't know why. I guess it's because that's where my heart is.

Even in the depths of sleep, in which he had to satisfy his need for protection and love by curling himself up into a trembling ball, he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness.

We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.

I dare not hope. I never was fainthearted before; but I cannot believe such a creature cares for me.

There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves

I am terrified by this dark thing That sleeps in me; All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. Clouds pass and disperse. Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? Is it for such I agitate my heart? I am incapable of more knowledge. What is this, this face So murderous in its strangle of branches? - Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.

Of all the conditions to which the heart is subject suspense is one that most gnaws and cankers into the frame. One little month of that suspense, when it involves death, we are told by an eye witness in "Wakefield on the Punishment of Death," is sufficient to plough fixed lines and furrows in a convict of five and twenty,--sufficient, to dash the brown hair with grey, and to bleach the grey to white.

The human heart cries out for help; the human soul implores us for deliverance; but we do not heed their cries, for we neither hear nor understand. But the man who hears and understands we call mad, and flee from him. Thus the nights pass, and we live in unawareness; and the days greet us and embrace us. But we live in constant dread of day and night.

From this haunting feeling of being not wanted, which remained a recurrent haunt through life, I found two ways of escape, both of which in changing form also persisted. One was the invention of gods, the other was personal efficiency in work.

The Loneliness One dare not sound -- And would as soon surmise AS in its Grave go plumbing To ascertain the size -- The Loneliness whose worst alarm Is lest itself should see -- And perish from before itself For just a scrutiny -- The Horror not to be surveyed -- But skirted in the Dark -- With Consciousness suspended -- And Being under Lock -- I fear me this -- is Loneliness -- The Maker of the soul Its Caverns and its Corridors Illuminate -- or seal

I have spent my life falling. Not the kind that Tiny's talking about. He's talking about love. I'm talking about life. In my kind of falling, there's no landing. There's only hitting the ground. Hard. Dead, or wanting to be dead. So the whole time you're falling, it's the worst feeling in the world. Because you feel you have no control over it. Because you know how it ends.

It is the strain of walking around the world-down the street, riding city buses and elevators, moving from place to place to place-and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula.

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.

O how the darkness do crowd up, one against the other, in ye hearts! What fear ye more that what ye have wroughten?