A Quote by Sue Monk Kidd

My children have always existed at the deepest center of me, right there in the heart/hearth, but I struggled with the powerful demands of motherhood, chafing sometimes at the way they pulled me away from my separate life, not knowing how to balance them with my unwieldy need for solitude and creative expression.

Sue Monk Kidd

Quote Topics

Always Away Balance Center Chafing Children Creative Creative Expression Deepest Demands Existed Expression Heart Hearth How Knowing Life Me Motherhood My Children Need Not Knowing Powerful Pulled Right Separate Solitude Sometimes Struggled Them Way

Quote Author

Sue Monk Kidd
American - Writer
Born: August 12, 1948

Patti Callahan Henry’s THE STORIES WE TELL is a lyrical exploration of love and longing, secrets and suspicion, family and friendship, all told with the author’s trademark insights into the hollows and curves of the heart and mind of a working woman who must balance the demands of motherhood, wifedom, sisterhood, and yes, the deepest cravings for artistic expression. I always love the stories PCH tells!

Mary Kay Andrews

True happiness is impossible without solitude.... I need solitude in my life as I need food and drink and the laughter of little children. Extravagant though it may sound, solitude is the filter of my soul. It nourishes me, and rejuvenates me. Left alone, I discovered that I keep myself good company.

Sophia Loren

In certain areas of my life, I actively seek out solitude. Especially for someone in my line of work, solitude is, more or less, an inevitable circumstance. Sometimes, however, this sense of isolation, like acid spilling out of a bottle, can unconsciously eat away at a person's heart and dissolve it. You could see it, too, as a kind of double-edged sword. It protects me, but at the same time steadily cuts away at me from the inside.

Haruki Murakami

By always looking out and always moving myself forward and being disciplined and being open to new experiences, I think that's how I was able to diversify because if it felt right to me creatively, I went for it. It didn't matter if I knew how to do that, I just did it because my creative heart felt pulled to it. That seems to have worked out.

Merle Dandridge

Sometimes I'll have an end in mind, but it's always false, always corny, just a dumb idea anyone could have, sitting on a barstool. An abstract thesis with no real life inside it. And then I start writing and the writing itself confounds me, taking away the comfort of knowing the end in advance. How is that even possible? Doesn't the conclusion come at the end? How can you begin with one - that seems odd, right?

Charles D'Ambrosio

For a while, I was feeling so creative in motherhood that I had no longing to work. I felt that my children needed me, that I couldn't leave them for a second.

Carrie-Anne Moss

I think if they wanted to get me to leave 'Children in Need,' they'd have to drag me off screaming. It's one thing that's so close to my heart, and I feel passionately about it. I gave up my radio show, with regret, but knowing I'd done it for a long time, the same with Eurovision. But 'Children in Need' is different.

Terry Wogan

I feel like the personal me and the artistic me are separate, but connected. It's almost like a Jekyll and Hyde thing. As much as you try to keep them apart, they end up together. I'm very much aware that when I'm miserable on the creative side - if I can't make things work a certain way - it really detracts from being the father I want to be. So in order to ultimately be a good father and the man I want to be I know I need to keep my creative side in check, or at least a little bit happy. It's weird how it's intertwined that way.

Frank Iero

Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

Barbara De Angelis

Women need real moments of solitude and self reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

Barbara De Angelis

My parents always told me to stay away from trouble. When I moved away from them at a young age, I was fine because they taught me how to do everything right.

David Ortiz

My ideas come, and there is a deep desire to create. Sometimes it's stronger than me. Sometimes I have to do projects that I know are almost impossible but I still have to do them. It's like a muscle - if you are a dancer, you need to dance, if you are a creative person, you need to create. It's part of your life.

Blanca Li

I always wanted to do something creative, but as much as I'm creative, it's in a really hard-core, right-brained way. For me, painting doesn't do it for me. There's no constraint.

Joshua Prince-Ramus

There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.

May Sarton

We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them. Nor should we represent motherhood as something so common and easy that everyone can go through it without harm or suffering and rear her children competently and well.