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The Dance of the Dissident Daughter QUOTES

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter QUOTES

1 " The symbol of Goddess gives us permission. She teaches us to embrace the holiness of every natural, ordinary, sensual dying moment. Patriarchy may try to negate body and flee earth with its constant heartbeat of death, but Goddess forces us back to embrace them, to take our human life in our arms and clasp it for the divine life it is - the nice, sanitary, harmonious moment as well as the painful, dark, splintered ones.

If such a consciousness truly is set loose in the world, nothing will be the same. It will free us to be in a sacred body, on a sacred planet, in sacred communion with all of it. It will infect the universe with holiness. We will discover the Divine deep within the earth and the cells of our bodies, and we will lover her there with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

2 " You forgive what you can, when you can. That's all you can do.

To forgive does not mean overlooking the offense and pretending it never happened. Forgiveness means releasing our rage and our need to retaliate, no longer dwelling on the offense, the offender, and the suffering, and rising to a higher love. It is an act of letting go so that we ourselves can go on. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

3 " I realized that lacking the feminine, the language had communicated to me in subtle ways that women were nonentities, that women counted mostly as they related to men. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

4 " Maybe one reason I had avoided anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

5 " Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

6 " Not setting the 'proper and accepted' religious example for them conjured up images of the bad mother, the worst mother. Yet wouldn't the example of a mother being true to her journey, taking a stand against patriarchy, and questing for spiritual meaning and wholeness, even when it meant exiting circles of orthodoxy, be a worthwhile example? "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

7 " But secluding my experience during that early period was both cowardly and wise. Some things are too fragile, too vulnerable to bring into the public eye. Tender things with tiny roots tend to wither in the glare of public scrutiny. By holding my awakening within, I contained the energy of it, and it fed me the way blood feeds muscle. It fed me a certain propelling energy, and I kept moving forward. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

8 " This surprised me because it made me realize that what I sought was not outside myself. It was within me, already there, waiting. Awakening was really the act of remembering myself, remembering this deep Feminine Source. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

9 " When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

10 " The second thing I wrote down that day was that exclusive male imagery of the Divine not only instilled an imbalance within human consciousness, it legitimized patriarchal power in the culture at large. Here alone is enough reason to recover the Divine Feminine, for there is a real and undeniable connection between the repression of the feminine in our deity and the repression of women. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

11 " I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

12 " There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming. But more than that, birthing the kind of woman who can authentically say, 'My soul is my own,' and then embody it in her life, her spirituality, and her community is worth the risk and hardship. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

13 " You create a path of your own by looking within yourself and listening to your soul, cultivating your own ways of experiencing the sacred and then practicing it. Practicing until you make it a song that sings you. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

14 " So I taught Sunday school and brought dishes to all manner of potlucks and tried to adjust the things I heard from the pulpit to my increasingly incongruent faith. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

15 " And second, once we are caught in the pattern of creating ourselves from cultural blueprints, it becomes a primary way of receiving validation. We become unknowingly bound up in a need to please the cultural father--the man holding the brush--and live up to his images of what a woman should be and do. We're rewarded when we do; life gets difficult when we don't. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

16 " Indeed, love is everything. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

17 " Elizabeth A. Johnson explains that including divine female symbols and images not only challenges the dominance of male images but also calls into question the structure of patriarchy itself. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

18 " Whatever else you do, listen to your Deepest Self. Love Her and be true to Her, speak Her truth, always. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

19 " The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

20 " Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience. "

― Sue Monk Kidd , The Dance of the Dissident Daughter