Kathryn Stockett Quotes

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.

Baby Girl," I say. "I need you remember everything I told you. Do you remember what I told you?" She still crying steady, but the hiccups are gone. "To wipe my bottom good when I'm done?" "No, baby, the other one. About who you are.

She already got the blue dress on I ironed this morning, the one with sixty-five pleats on the waist, so tiny I got to squint through my glasses to iron. I don’t hate much in life, but me and that dress is not on good terms.

You is kind. You is smart. You is important.

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s.

Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.

Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious

I hear Raleigh's new accounting business isn't doing well.

Maybe up in New York or somewhere it's a good thing, but in Jackson, Mississippi, people just don't care to do business with a rude, condescending asshole.

At one O'Clock, Miss Celia comes in the kitchen and says she's ready for her first cooking lesson. She settles on a stool. She's wearing a tight red sweater and a red skirt and enough makeup to scare a hooker.

As children, we looked up to our maids and our nannies, who were playing in some ways the role of our mothers. They were paid to be nice to us, to look after us, teach us things and take time out of their day to be with us. As a child you think of these people as an extension of your mother.

...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.

But after Mr. Evers got shot a week ago, lot a colored folk is frustrated in this town. Especially the younger ones, who ain't built up a callus yet.

If singing was a color, it would've been the color of that chocolate.

Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.

Bosoms are for bedrooms and breastfeeding.

I'm a Southerner - I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve.

I guess if I'm forced to find a good side, I'm glad that people are talking about an issue that hasn't really been discussed all that much. I'm glad that people are talking about it from the black perspective and the white perspective.

Mother calls up the stairs to ask what in the world I'm typing up there all day and I holler down, 'Just typing up some notes from the Bible study. Just writing down all the things I love about Jesus.

I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine.

Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. She is tall and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full-grown woman.

Some readers tell me, 'We always treated our maid like she was a member of the family.' You know, that's interesting, but I wonder what your maid's perspective was on that.

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.

All I'm saying is, kindness don't have no boundaries.

...and that's when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?

....we ain't doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.

She dumb.” I sigh. “But she ain’t stupid.

Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.

Stuart stands and says, 'Come here,' and he's on my side of the room in one stride and he claps my hands to his hips and kisses my mouth like I am the drink he's been dying for all day and I've heard girls say it's like melting, that feeling. But I think it's like rising, growing even taller and seeing sights over a hedge, colors you've never seen before.

I have decided not to die.

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.

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.

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.

It seems like at some point you'd run out of awful.

They say it's like true love, good help.

you only get one in a lifetime.....there is so much you don't know about a person. i wonder if i could've made her days a little bit easier, if I'd tried. if i'd treated her a little nicer.

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.

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.

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.

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

Got to be the worst place in the world, inside a oven.

You in here, you either cleaning or you getting cooked.

And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

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.

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.

I'm sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?

Lord, I never seen blue hair on a black woman before or since.

Leroy say you look like a cracker from outer space.

With other people, Hilly hands out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt, but it's our own silent agreement, this strict honesty, perhaps the one thing that has kept us friends

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.

President Kennedy’s assassination, less than two weeks ago, has struck the world dumb. It’s like no one wants to be the first to break the silence. Nothing seems important.

I nursed a worthless, pint drinker for twelve years and when my lazy, life-sucking, daddy finally died, I swore to God with tears in my eyes I'd never marry one. And then I did.

It can be really powerful to write something when youre sad.

No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.

I'm tired of the rules," I say.