“…and that’s when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?” – Aibileen Clark
“Every 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?” – Constantine Bates
“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.” – Skeeter
“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.” – Skeeter
“That’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going.” – Aibileen Clark
“Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.” – Skeeter
“Fried chicken always makes me feel a little better about life.” – Minny Jackson
“No one tells us, girls who don’t go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.”
“It seems like at some point you’d run out of awful.”
“Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.”
“Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.”
“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” – Aibileen Clark
“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.” – Constantine
“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.”
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“I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.” – Aibileen Clark
“All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.”
“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.” – Constantine
“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.” – Skeeter
“I’m sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?”
“I’d cry, if only I had the time to do it.”
“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.” – Skeeter
“I may not remember my name or what country I live in, but you and that pie is something I will never forget.” – Mrs. Walters
“They ain’t rich folks. Rich folks don’t try so hard.” – Aibileen Clark
“You see her in the Jitney 14 grocery, you never think she go leave her baby crying in her crib like that. But the help always know.” – Aibileen Clark
“I could tell she don’t understand why a colored woman can’t raise no white-skin baby in Mississippi. It be a hard lonely life, not belonging here nor there.” – Constantine Bates
“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 speck a work-dirt on it.” – Aibileen Clark
“But I know I’ll have to rewrite everything [Aibileen’s] written, wasting even more time.” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“You cannot give these tribal people money […]. There is no Jitney 14 Grocery in the Ogaden Desert. And how would we even know if they’re even feeding their kids with it? They’re likely to go to the local voodoo tent and get a satanic tattoo with our money.” – Hilly Holbrook
“Good. Then get going. Before this civil rights thing blows over.” – Elaine Stein
“Say she’d pay her back her back some every week, but Miss Hilly say no. That a true Christian don’t give in charity to those who is well and able. Say it’s kinder to let them learn to work things out themselves.” – Yule May Crookle
“The churches got together though. They gone send both those boys to college.” – Yule May Crookle
“A bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help. I’ve even notified the surgeon general of Mississippi to see if he’ll endorse the idea. I’ll pass.” – Hilly Holbrook
“I knew he wasn’t married to Constantine’s mother, because that was against the law.” – Eugenia ‘Skeeter’ Phelan
“I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain’t a color, disease ain’t the n**** side of town. I want to stop that moment from coming – and it come in every white child’s life – when they start to think that colored folks are not as good as whites.” – Mae Mobley Leefolt
“You know colored folks ain’t allowed in that library.” – Mae Mobley Leefolt
“[…] I’m proud a what I’m selling. I can’t help it. We all telling stories that need to be told.” – Aibileen Clark
“This one’s for the white lady. Tell her we love her like, like she’s our own family.” – Reverend Johnson
“But it wasn’t too long before I seen something in me had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside a me. And I just didn’t feel so accepting anymore.” – Aibileen Clark
“She telling everybody in town I’m stealing! That’s why I can’t get no work! That witch done turned me into the Smart-Mouthed Criminal Maid a Hide County!” – Minny Jackson
“Constantine’s the only woman I’ve ever had to look up to, to look her straight in the eye.” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“We all know about these laws, but we don’t talk about them. This is the first time I’ve ever seen them written down.” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“We ain’t… we ain’t doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.” – Aibileen Clark
“But what would they do? Hitch us to a pickup and drag us behind? Shoot me in my yard? Or just starve us to death?” – Minny Jackson
“I wait for her to catch the irony of this, that she’ll send money to colored people overseas, but not across town.” – Hilly Holbrook
“If I didn’t hit you, Minny, who knows what you’d become.” – Leroy Jackson
“There is undisguised hate for white woman, there is inexplicable love.” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“Who knew heartbreak would be so goddamn hot?” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“Oh, we’re gonna have some kids. […] I mean, kids is the only thing worth living for.” – Celia Rae Foote
“Plenty of black men leave their families behind like trash in a dump, but it’s not something the colored woman do. We’ve got the kids to think about” – Minny Jackson
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“A bill that requires every white home to have a separate bathroom for the colored help. I’ve even notified the surgeon general of Mississippi to see if he’ll endorse the idea.” – Hilly Holbrook
“What you think I am? A chauffeur? I ain’t driving you to no country club in the pouring rain.” – Minny Jackson
“Are you…do you find …find men attractive? Are you having unnatural thoughts about…girls or-or women?” – Charlotte Phelan
“If you can love your enemy, you already have victory.” – Preacher Green
“I am neither thrilled nor disappointed by the news that they might let a colored man into Ole Miss, just surprised.” – Skeeter
“Your eggs are dying. Would it kill you to go on a date?” – Charlotte Phelan
“Courage sometimes skips a generation. Thank you for bringing it back to our family.” – Charlotte Phelan
“Love and hate are two horns on the same goat, Eugenia. And you need a goat.” – Charlotte Phelan
“Get your raggedy ass off my porch.” – Charlotte Phelan
“I guarantee you, one day they’re going to figure out cigarettes will kill you.” – Mr. Blackly
“Oysters are a vehicle for crackers and ketchup.” – Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan
“I hope you write something really good. Something you believe in.” – Stuart Whitworth
“You find a way to make it happen. Any way at all.” – Yule May
