YouSaid · the spoken record

Sue Monk Kidd

lines on the record: 49
first: 2018-11-28
most recent: 2018-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Compassion and love are what we're going to care about. The love I gave, the love I received, that's probably the most important thing. Trying to be a human family, you know, those things I know for sure that they matter. And I guess I would say, I say this to myself all the time just to be is holy. just to live is a gift I know that for sure”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, as I get older, I try to love the uncertainties more than I do the certainties. What's popping in my head is something I read by Stephen Hawking not too long ago. He said that real genius is radical humility. And the reason he said this was because he said when you humble yourself before what you don't know. You open yourself to possibility. But having said that How he said that. I guess if I know anything for sure. It's that what we pay attention to matters. It's that when it's all said and done,”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of course. Of course I ask myself that about my life all the time. And I'm going to go back and say that I think it is to love and to create. It's to align ourselves with God, with the divine, and that is mainly through to love and to create. Maybe that's it”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of Grace well as everywhere and unexpected. Some goodness, some love, some eloquence of life life speaks to us, you know. I think life is always talking to us and very eloquent about it. We just can't often hear it. But moments like that.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God is an ineffable mystery for one thing, but I do think of God as that deepest part of us and the realm in which we exist. God is personal to me and God is consciousness beyond me. I mean, I think God encompasses so many things for me. But I also feel that we need images of God. We need symbols. We need ways to relate. We need language. And so that's why William Blake said we can see the earth in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. It's like that. It's like taking this ineffable mystery And making it accessible to us in distilled ways through an image. It's like heaven in a wallflower.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am becoming that woman, yes, and I can own that at sixty, and I think for me I have this phrase that I call the old woman and I say that with great fondness. My daughter and I went on travels and wrote a book, traveling with pomegranates, and on those journeys, I was searching for that old woman, the woman I wanted to grow into. She's wise. She's bold. She's strong and resilient. She knows her voice. She speaks it, and she stands by it. This is the old woman for me. You know, she's distilled down. In my novel The Invention of Wings, there's a moment where Handful looks at Sarah, my character at the end, and she says, she's been boiled down into a good, strong broth. I want to be that. I want to be a good strong broth that has those qualities of the old woman I went off searching for.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we give the attention of our heart to matters deeply. So when we give the attention of our heart just to ourselves or our worries or our fears,”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe that. I definitely believe that. Yeah. And it's the quality of the attention, too. It's the quality of the present, yeah. It's important. It's not just, oh, I'm paying attention. It's the quality of that attention.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes I do, but as I said, prayer is so large for me. It's such an immense thing. Taking a walk is often what I do, you know, to walk along this Corridor by the Gulf. Every day, that's a prayer, you know, putting feet to it. That feels like I'm getting in sync with something inside myself. Anything that takes me to that interior place, that true self, that divine life and something.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you could describe them as cocoons. I mean, you go into a cocoon in some new part of yourself emerges. And it's not that you leave oneself behind. It's that It's an integration, all of these selves come together and create who you are eventually. But yeah, I've had many awakenings, many little deaths and rebirths in my life.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think life is a process of that. You wake up, then you wake up some more. You die to oneself, you're reborn. It's an evolution of consciousness. I mean, if you look at the way God created the world, it's always about a seed and a sprout and a flower, and then it goes back to seed. It's always about process and unfolding. I think we're probably on a journey of... Greater and greater consciousness. Becoming more compassionate, more loving. And that is a lifelong spiraling process.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and it can be a very small, very ordinary thing, but that is often what we're asked to do in moment to moment. Sometimes it is, it's usually for me to pause and think I won't react. I won't react right now. I'll just wait a moment. And in that moment of waiting, I return to something. And it's in each moment to moment pausing and returning to that.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his poem, I think it was the prelude. And he said, we need these spots of time to remember that we are holy. And have these spots of times, I think it emboldens us to go be brave and live that truth.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you just do it every day. It's like small daily braveries every day. You know, you just wake up and remind yourself, I need a lot of reminders, a lot of prompters, and that's why we have to go to”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like there's a hunger in you. And I think it's appropriate, you know, to follow that. But we should also be finders at the same time. It's one of those paradoxes that I'm getting more comfortable living with, that we can be a seeker and a finder at the same time. But, you know, We have to acknowledge sometimes that this moment is enough. This place is enough. I am enough. It's okay. And if I never seek another thing, it's enough. It grounds us in our own being. It grounds us in home.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember all this seeking I did, especially through my 30s and into my 40s and somewhere nearing my fifties. I remember thinking it's time to start finding things, you know?”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I love about the spiritual life. And it should be, really. It's both. Extraordinary and ordinary. And sometimes these moments of awakening or knowing, they can come to us when we least expect it.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a writer. I'm a teacher, I'm this, I'm that. But is that who we really are? I mean, those are our external selves. And the reality is we're something much larger than that. Our true identity is in God. Our true identity is the true self inside of us with a big T. It's this part of us that is the authentic and deepest and most transcendent self. And I don't know what to call it. Merton called it the true self. So I'll go with that. But it's not these external selves. It's not these ego selves. It's something else. And so maybe the whole point of life in one way is. To discover that and to align ourselves with that, to become more of that.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm telling you that question threw me. But that day, I remember thinking, well, the census takers all ask these questions, who are you? Well, you say I'm Simone's wife. I'm Simone's mother. I'm someone's sister, I'm someone's daughter.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, never forget that moment. It was an aha for me because I was driving along and I had been grappling a lot with that question, who am I? I've been trying to answer that through memoirs for about three decades. Okay, so I don't feel bad about three days.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I heard her speak long years ago in North Carolina. I traveled from South Carolina just to hear her. She said I'll never forget it. I wrote it down in my notes that day. She said. It only takes three things to be a writer. Gotta have something to say. You gotta have the ability to say it. But you've got to have the courage to say it at all. And that's the hardest one. And I thought, uh-huh, I understand that. And it's not just the courage to voice ourselves. It's the courage to voice our authentic self. Not what we think ought to be said, but the real truth of our soul.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, courage is another important component in all of this, the courage to ask that question, what lies at the bottom of my heart, the courage to set that intention, to announce it, to make the annunciation somewhere. And even if it takes our own breath. We should take our own breath once in a while.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was both. Both. I mean, I look, I didn't think of it at the time as if it were courage. It was only later that you look back and you think. I went out on the...”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did because I knew that I wanted to be a writer since I was a child. But when it came time to go to college and make these choices, I chose something traditional”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very esteemed teacher, yes. And so I thought, what do I know? I'm going to do what he said. Well, it was only later by, I think, a great serendipity for me that I found my way back into that novel and reclaimed my own. Understanding of what I was supposed to do here. You know, we have to listen to our own creative instincts But it doesn't hurt to listen to a teacher once in a while because the truth was I wasn't really ready to write that book. I went on writing for another three years finding my voice as a fiction writer before I came back and wrote the novel.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I did for a little while, you know? Yeah. I did turn, I mean, I was a novice. This was the first thing piece of fiction I had ever written. And it was the first chapter of the novel. And I put it aside. But the interesting thing was it was.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite a few years, maybe seven or so. I began work, I began working on it. I wrote a chapter of it and took it to a writer's conference and was told that it didn't really have potential as a novel. Another failure of courage put it aside, turned it into a short story, and that was it. But I went on writing and trying to find my way with this.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to be a novelist. Sometimes it's that simple that you take a moment and you ask yourself, what's the thing that lies in the bottom of my heart? And then it just comes up. Sometimes it's like that.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what she was trying to say was ask for the deepest thing in yourself, but it came out, ask for the thing that lies in the bottom of your heart. And I never forgot that. And I thought, how many women have this thing that lies in the bottom of their heart that they aren't paying attention to that wants to be there, that wants a place in their lives. And so we all took a turn that the women I was traveling with and we went up under this tree where there's this amazing icon of Mary and we asked for the thing in the bottom of our hearts. And I blurted out. I want to be a novelist. It kind of took me by surprise.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. I think we all have something that pulls the soul and that we can give and contribute, something that lights us up. And when we talk about it, you can often see the lights come on in people. And we have to stop, sometimes pause, hit the stop button and really listen to ourselves, listen to the yearning in ourselves. It's talking to us. I was in Greece. In 1993, I made this trip to Greece, and I was on the island of Crete, and we went to this little Greek Orthodox convent, very old. There's a tree there that is sacred to these nuns. And this little nun about 411 came over, and she was trying to explain to us that there's a tradition that you go up to the tree and you ask for the thing, and she described it like this, in the bottom of your heart.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever brings us alive is something we should follow. You know, it's what we have a great affinity for. It's what pulls us. It's what we long for. It feels like it has an inner necessity to it sometimes. And when we pursue that, when we get close to that, I think we are on the edge of becoming and we do wake and we become alive. So whatever... Brings us alive. We should pay attention to that.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does help when we Make that kind of statement. It's an enunciation to ourselves, to the powers that be, you know, to the divine. This is my intention. So I think it helps to say our intention out loud. And then the moment I said it, of course, I thought, what do I know about this? It is a great absurdity, but everybody needs a great absurdity, at least one of them, right?”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I kept a journal from time to time. That was something I had done as a child. When I was a little girl, I used to write little stories and newspapers and all kinds of things. But until I was 30, I really had not pursued it. I had walked away from it.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was writing, of course, and when I made this announcement in the kitchen, you know, my husband said, oh, that's great, you know, and continued to get them to eat them to eat their cereal. And that was it. I didn't know anything about writing. I called it myself. So you write him in writing?”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I marched into the kitchen where my husband was getting our two toddlers to either cereal and announced and made my big annunciation I'm going to be a writer. And I was getting in touch with that creative desire inside of me and I began to understand that I was going home, I was going to write because that had been an innate desire in me as a child. You know, you find this little light in yourself and then, of course, you lose it and you have to refind it and you lose it. I mean, that's part of finding our place of belonging. But I walked in.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a pretty good nurse. I cared. I did my best. But you know when you're not in your place of belonging, you know eventually. And then that homesickness starts for your real home. But when I began to write, it was a homecoming, of course.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know, I wanted it to work, but I felt out of line. I felt like I wasn't in that place of belonging. And it just took me a while to Were you a good nurse?”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do I belong to? I mean, what is faith if not paying attention to what we belong to? So I think that's when I was a nurse, which is the most noble thing in the world. There isn't.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. I felt that I was not in my place of belonging. And that is a big thing for me to be in my place of belonging. In fact, all of my characters are always looking for their place.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely did. I think sometimes you feel homesick at home kind of feeling. It manifests like a restlessness. The soul often speaks through Least for me through longing And when the soul longs, you know, it's trying to tell you something. But I think the soul speaks through what pulls us, that allure. Belonging, the restlessness. Yes, and often”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how I pray. I mean, There are many ways to pray. I think of Merton's prayer. He said, the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind and the trees is my prayer. And that's how I feel. I mean, it's all prayer to me. There's no separation again. It's writing when I write. I pray it's the attention of the heart.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In truth, I was drawn to these places because they were concentrations of silence and stillness and prayer and this connection to that great mystery that I wanted to find, that I wanted to relate to. And so I began to write. And I think this is my deepest prayer is to be able to try to give some expression to what's inside of myself. And so I began to write”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I began to read the classics of spirituality, mainly of the Western Christian tradition. That's how I began. And I began to haunt monasteries. I used to joke, oh, well, you know, my middle name is Monk. People, why are you going to these places? Well, my name is Monk.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mystery, the mystery, the great mystery. The great mystery. Yes, it became more and more encompassing and expansive. How did that show itself in your actual life?”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I read this book and it revealed to me something I had not known, that we have this immense interior life inside of us. We could call it the life of the soul. I think poets and mystics and people have been trying to figure out what to call this for a long time. But there is an inner silence in it. And there is an incredible mystery floating in it. And I was lured by that. And I had been on... This journey ever since, because I think this is where the divine lives in us is in this interior place. And yes, so I've been seeking that and finding it. So what happened when you first started to read Merton is that your perception, the way you were raised, Baptist Church, just as I was Started to open up, and God became bigger, not just up there, but became more expansive and”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to Sunday school Baptist Training Union Wednesday night prayer service, all of that. Exactly. Exactly. Every week. Every week.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was an utter surprise to me to discover this amazing interior life inside of us. I had grown up. Protestant, a Baptist church. Like I did, yes. Going to Sunday school”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mostly on Super Soul Sunday, is that path. Finding that path for ourselves and Being able to discover The essence of who we really are. So this is a quote from your very first memoir written more than 25 years ago. You say there have been moments in my life when I sat in the utter quietness of a deserted room and had the noise of a fireworkshow going on inside me. And there have been rare times when I stood in a crowd of noisy people and tapped into a deep inner silence. It is this interior quietness, a silence within us that is a door through which God can come to us. So I want to know how did you first discover that door through which God can come to us? I think this was the largest discovery of my life. It changed me dramatically when I was 29. I happened to read the work of Thomas Merton.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, we're going to talk about the book, The Invention of Wings, but I really wanted to talk to you about what we talk about.”
2018-11-28 · Oprah's Super Soul · Sue Monk Kidd: The Life of the Soul · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source