Kathryn Stockett > Quotes

“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. You gone have to ask yourself, "Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“All I'm saying is, kindness don't have no boundaries.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“That's what I love about Aibileen, she can take the most complicated things in life and wrap them up so small and simple, they'll fit right in your pocket.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Truth.
It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that's been burning me up all my life.
Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“it always sound scarier when a hollerer talk soft.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I'm sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton's over to shoot guns in the field.
'Why you crying, girl?' Constantine asked me in the kitchen.
I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face.
'Well? Is you?'
I blinked, paused my crying. 'Is I what?'
'Now you look a here, Egenia'-because constantien was the only one who'd occasionally follow Mama's rule. 'Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?'
'I don't know. I don't think so,' I sobbed.
Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, somthing we both knew meant Listen. Listen to me.
'Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.' Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. 'You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?'
She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“...and that's when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Once upon a time they was two girls," I say. "one girl had black skin, one girl had white."
Mae Mobley look up at me. She listening.
"Little colored girl say to little white girl, 'How come your skin be so pale?' White girl say, 'I don't know. How come your skin be so black? What you think that mean?'
"But neither one a them little girls knew. So little white girl say, 'Well, let's see. You got hair, I got hair.'"I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head.
"Little colored girl say 'I got a nose, you got a nose.'"I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me.
"Little white girl say, 'I got toes, you got toes.' And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can't get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on.
"'So we's the same. Just a different color', say that little colored girl. The little white girl she agreed and they was friends. The End."
Baby Girl just look at me. Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. Wasn't even no plot to it. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, "Tell it again.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“That's the way prayer do. It's like electricity, it keeps things going.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“It seems like at some point you'd run out of awful.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“...out of the blue, he kissed me. Right in the middle of the Robert E. Lee Hotel Restaurant, he kissed me so slowly with an open mouth and every single thing in my body-my skin, my collarbone, the hollow backs of my knees, everything inside of me filled up with light.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“She's wearing a tight red sweater and a red skirt and enough makeup to scare a hooker.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I'd cry, if only I had the time to do it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I listened wide-eyed, stupid. Glowing by her voice in the dim light. If chocolate was a sound, it would've been Constantine's voice singing. If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Frying chicken always makes me feel a little better about life.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I tell myself that's what you get when you put thirty-one toilets on the most popular girl's front yard. People tend to treat you a little differently than before.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“You got nothing left here but enemies in the Junior League and a mama that's gonna drive you to drink. You done burned ever bridge there is. And you ain't never gone get another boyfriend in this town and everbody know it. So don't walk your white butt to New York, run it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“....I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
― Kathryn Stockett

“And you call yourself a Christian,' were Hilly's words to me and I thought, God. When did I ever do that?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“It weren’t too loo long before I seen something in me, had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside of me. And I just didn’t feel so, accepting, anymore.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Oh, it was delicious to have someone to keep secrets with. If I'd had a sister or a brother closer in age, I guessed that's what it would be like. But it wasn't just smoking or skirting around Mother. It was having someone look at you after your mother has nearly fretted herself to death because you are freakishly tall and frizzy and odd. Someone whose eyes simply said, without words, You are fine with me.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“When you little, you only get asked two questions, what’s your name and how old you is, so you better get em right.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.”
― Kathryn Stockett

“I don't know what to say to her. All I know is, I ain't saying it. And I know she ain't saying what she want a say either and it's a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I worked for Miss Margaret thirty-eight years. She had her a baby girl with the colic and the only thing that stopped the hurting was to hold her. So I made me a wrap. I tied her up on my waist, toted her around all day with me for a entire year. That baby like to break my back. Put ice packs on it ever night and still do. But I loved that girl. And I loved Miss Margaret.

Miss Margaret always made me put my hair up in a rag, say she know coloreds don't wash their hair. Counted ever piece a silver after I done the polishing. When Miss Margaret die of the lady problems thirty years later, I go to the funeral. Her husband hug me, cry on my shoulder. When it's over, he give me a envelope. Inside a letter from Miss Margaret reading, 'Thank you. For making my baby stop hurting. I never forgot it.'
Callie takes off her black-rimmed glasses, wipes her eyes.
If any white lady reads my story, that's what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you-she shakes her head, stares down at the scratched table-it's so good.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Babies love fat.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“That's all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Mrs. Charlotte Phelan's Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Womens, they ain't like men. A woman ain't gone beat you with a stick. Miss Hilly wouldn't pull no pistol on me. Miss Leefolt wouldn't come burn my house down. No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set of tools they use, sharp as witches' fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I give in and light another cigarette even though last night the surgeon general came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody, trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once told me tongue kissing would turn me blind and I'm starting to think it's all just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sure no one ever has any fun.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“Got to be the worst place in the world, inside a oven. You in here, you either cleaning or you getting cooked.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“I used to believe in em (lines). I don't anymore. They in our heads. Lines between black and white ain't there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and the so-ciety ladies too.”
― Kathryn Stockett