QUOTES FROM THE HELP BOOK

“You is kind. You is smart. You is important.”

“Change ain’t for sissies.”

“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”

“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.”

“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?'”

“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.”

“You is kind. You is smart. You is important. But the most important thing is, even if we’re apart… I’ll always be with you.”

“She had light blue eyes and her skin had been bleached by years of Mississippi sun. If her eyes had been that color brown that is called whiskey, she would have been prettier than she was. Her skin was as thin as cicada wings and she was probably overall, a dark-complected seven-year-old girl.”

“I’d cry, if only I had the time to do it.”

“Nobody can help me. All I can do is go back to when I was a little girl and recognize the reason my mother was treated bad wasn’t because she had agreed to be my father’s whore. It wasn’t because she was stubborn and liked to have her own money. It wasn’t because she didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut or because she liked being the center of attention. It was simply because she was a colored woman and wasn’t supposed to expect anything else. But I could change that for her.”

“Was not lost and never had been lost, though finding her hadn’t been an easy thing.”

“I realized that if I ever wanted something better to happen to me, if I ever wanted to stop burying my babies, then I needed to cowardly-ass Miss Celia to stand up at the Christmas table that very night and say, ‘That ain’t true. We done good.'”

“So now I run to look the part of motherly tenderness as well as to fully perform it in practice.” ANGRY FEELINGS QUOTES

“Ugly was a clothes hanger. She looked good in anything.”

“Minny doesn’t burn chicken, she burns draft cards.”

“They tired to ruin it, but I didn’t let them ruin it. I said I couldn’t help but write about life.”

“I thought of the new article today about the Carvel ice cream stand going up on the state fairgrounds. About how Mississippi is changing, but not much has changed for me.”

“Nobody tells white lies about me.”

“You say that they can send her to jail again unless she admits to something she never done? Law, Miss Skeeter, that’s a threat.”

“But the truth is, I don’t know what I think about Miss Leefolt, cause mostly I don’t.”

“Two by two, in this preposterously God-forsaken heat. I will never again walk four by four. I will never again go around in threes. The numbers have been reduced, I belong to a club called wiped clean.”

“I didn’t always know what I was going to write about, but I knew I was going to be a writer. It was easy to say and harder to make happen if you’re white, then it’s really hard if you’re colored.”

“They could print less news about war and terrorism and more on celebrity mishaps, and they never did.”

“It’s a miracle of modern science.”

“I may never know what it feels like to be Hunt’s girl, but I know what it feels like to be set free.”