Carrie Link

Sue Monk Kidd

Top 10 Quotes from The Dance of the Dissident Daughter:

10. "Feminist thealogian Carol P. Christ states that a woman's awakening begins with an 'experience of nothingness.' It comes as she experiences emptiness, self-negation, disillusionment, a deep-felt recognition of the limitation placed on women's lives, especially her own."

9. "...we carry not only our own wounding experiences, but the inherited wounds of our mothers and grandmothers as well."

8. "...as long as one woman is dehumanized, none of us can be fully human."

7. "During awakening, volatility often lies just beneath the surface of a woman's relationshop with her partner...Men need to become aware, but blaming them does not help. It only polarizes. Eventually I came to see that what's needed is to invite men into our struggle, to make them part of our quest."

6. "Overall, women's voices have not been encouraged unless they spoke as mouthpieces for the party line. Quiet ladies who held their tongues were loved and lauded. Uppity, pioneering women who spoke their minds and said bold things were attacked and sanctioned. 'And that plays into our greratest fear, which is going against convention and having love and approval taken away,' says writer Erica Jong.
Very often silence becomes the female drug of choice."

5. "My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period."

4. "...the wise and difficult love that reminds parents that all we can really do is be true to our own spiritual unfolding and trust that our examples will one day help them be true to theirs. For children have a guiding spiritual wisdom inside of them, too."

3. "(Women) have to come to understand ourselves as central, not peripheral, before anything real can happen. We have to depend on ourselves... This cannot be done against men, and that's the real problem... It cannot be woman against man. It has to be woman finding her true self with or without man, but not against man." - May Sarton

2. "Women's lives are made up of cycles of descent and ascent. At crucial times we must seek out periods of inner solitude, deep brooding and being, intervals of spiritual apartness where we move down into the depths of ourselves to mine the dark gorge and bring new treasure into the light."

1. "Yet anger needs not only to be recognized and allowed; like the grief, it eventually needs to be transformed into an energy that serves compassion. Maybe one reason I had avoided my 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. We can allow anger's enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy. Anger can fuel our abilty to challenge, to defy injustice. It can lead to creative projects, constructive behavior, acts that work toward inclusion. In such ways anger becomes a dynamism of love."

That's all I'm sayin, I hope that's all you're hearing me say!

love.