The Calamity Club Quotes

“My entire life’s assignment is to ask questions. Why else are we even here?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“If you give a girl a taste of fresh air and then take it away, she will grow fierce and wild to get that fresh air back again.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“This slapped-together band of misfits made me feel, for the first time, that I truly belonged. How the hell, I wondered, did I ever get so lucky?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“...you stick that up your ass, you stinky hooker whore, Flossie said back to her. No Flossie, we don't call Ruby a stinky hooker whore while we're at the table.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“I wonder what those ladies would do if a retard leper Jew walked in the door.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“I didn’t have to wonder much what’d enlightened me—in a few weeks, I’d fallen in love with a married man, had my eyebrows plucked, started a dance club when my sister was out of town, and was getting dropped off at church by five prostitutes.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“she”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“I’m telling you, the cut’s 50 percent, not a penny more, three dollars a week for board, five for the upfront,”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all!”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“After 1940, most of those sterilized were working-class women of color, including Fannie Lou Hamer, who many believe coined the heartbreaking term “Mississippi appendectomy.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“passed by Congress in 1918”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“For over half a century, tens of thousands of American women were seized and “forcibly examined,” historian Scott W. Stern writes. “If they misbehaved or if they failed to show ‘proper’ ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown in solitary confinement—or even sterilized.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“The national eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, who first introduced what became the modern IQ test, tested thousands of New York City public schoolchildren for imbecility.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“They’ll lock the doors and start going through her belongings to either auction off separately or include with the house to raise the value when they have the foreclosure sale.” “You mean—the furniture … and their clothes?”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“A month after Meg arrived at the Orphan, Garnett got herself elected chairlady.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“punished,”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“the president’s words in a low, steady voice: “We are not going through another winter like the last. I doubt if ever any people so bravely and cheerfully endured a season half so bitter.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“acting”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“Unfortunately, paint can’t fix what’s rotten down deep, Meg. There is bound to be a life lesson in there somewhere.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“As in crazy? I reckon, but you know, crazy’s relative. That means we all are a little, but we think everybody else is. Like a one-way mirror. But there is actual crazy out there.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“could probably get somebody in to fix the holes and paint the walls. Least give you an idea of how much it would run you to fix that roof.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“In a couple years most those big girls’ll be having one illegitimate baby after the next, just like their mamas.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“That was a tour of grand old antebellum homes where ladies in hoop skirts and men in Confederate uniforms asked the Negroes to kindly pretend they were slaves again. When The Delta Dispatch printed a two-page spread on it, I wrote to inform them, THAT IS NOT”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“Chippendales”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“That was when I knew Ava was the best friend for me. But two months ago she turned twelve and got sent to Biloxi to work at the cannery.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“I have been told I tend to overthink things. Well I have known enough people to underthink things and could stand to put a little more thought in their decisions.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“No, I am teaching you to be a lady, Meg. She said she could spot the difference a mile away. I would be starting school that fall and I would not show up acting like a hick.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“geek was the caged man at the fair who ate the live animals. Ruby’s”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club

“There was something wrong with the world if the Delta wasn’t smothered in green cotton by July.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Calamity Club