The Help Quotes
"Taking care of white babies, that's what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning."
"It? That was my first hint: something is wrong with this situation."
"Babies like fat. Like to bury their face up in your armpit and go to sleep."
"By the time she a year old, Mae Mobley following me around everywhere I go."
"The only reason she waiting on Miss Walter so long is Miss Walter be deaf as a door knob."
"But one night he working late at the Scanlon-Taylor mill, lugging two-by-fours to the truck, splinters slicing all the way through the glove."
"I ain’t never been happier in my whole life."
"But underneath all that happy, she sure doesn’t look happy."
"And when Miss White Lady catches her man with the lady next door, you keep out of it, you hear me?"
"You is kind. You is smart. You is important."
"I'd hoped, however, you'd choose topics that actually had some punch to them."
"It's always nice seeing the kids grown up fine."
"I pray that wasn't her moment. Pray I still got time."
"I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe."
"Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision."
"Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else."
"A pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund."
"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 love reading about how the head work. You ever dream you fall in a lake? He say you dreaming about your own self being born."
"It feel... maybe... we could go on to the next one."
"I was thinking I ought to do some reading. Might help me with my own writing."
"I'd rather be in the old truck, but Mother would’ve been too suspicious and Daddy was using it in the fields."
"I've been so wrapped up in my own self, it hasn’t occurred to me that Aibileen might be as thrilled as I am that an editor in New York is going to read her story."
"I’ve tried to urge her out of it, over the phone. 'Writing isn’t that easy. And you wouldn’t have time for this anyway, Aibileen, not with a full-time job.'"
"I ain’t never had a white person in my house before."
"These is white rules. I don’t know which ones you following and which ones you ain’t."
"Every window in that filthy house was painted shut on the inside, even though the house was big with a wide green lawn."
"This many Negro and white people haven’t worked together since Gone With the Wind."
"I said nothing of the sort," she snaps. "I will read it. I look at a hundred manuscripts a month and reject nearly all of them."
"Little colored girl say to the 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?’"
"‘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."
"Miss Skeeter, she asking Miss Leefolt about a list a girls who serving on a committee and Miss Leefolt say, ‘The head of the cupcake committee is Eileen,’ and Miss Skeeter say, ‘But the cupcake committee chairman is Roxanne,’ and Miss Leefolt say, ‘No, the cupcake co-chair is Roxanne and Eileen is the cupcake head,’"
"I know about the stories you’re working on. With that friend of Miss Hilly’s."
"We so close to getting enough money together."
"We want a do all kind a stories. Good things and bad."
"You driving me crazy hanging around this house twenty-five hours a day. Get. Go chop down that poor mimosa tree you hate so much."
"It’s just…a risk I can’t afford to take right now."
"I laugh and mutter to myself, even though everbody gone think I’m even crazier for it."
"Thank the Lord Miss Hilly hasn’t showed up here to play bridge."
"I’m sorry, but Henry and the boys are waiting on me."
"So what if she take a nip or two to get through the day?"
"It’s like a hot water bottle plopped on top of the colored neighborhood, making it ten degrees worse than the rest of Jackson."
"But I’ve got more important things to worry about than if Miss Celia’s won the damn popularity contest."
"I ought to pour them things down the drain. I ought to tell Mister Johnny right now—"
"I can’t believe the charade has gone on this long."
"Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you—it’s so good."
"It’s like she’d rather be dead than stand being inside me another second."
"It smells like meat, like hamburger defrosting on the counter."
"She been so good to me. I wash her hair ever Friday."
"I wanted this baby to look just like Johnny."
"I pray to God I can get my job back on Monday."
"I don’t care about eating at a counter with white people."
"I must be crazy, giving the sworn secrets a the colored race to a white lady."
"But truth is, I don’t care that much about voting."
"I don’t mean in the same room, I mean at the same table."
"I don’t think they gone find out who we are."
"I reckon not. Fact, a white lady might do worse."
"Lines between black and white ain't there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago."
"I feel bad for Miss Skeeter. I know she don't want a go, but Miss Hilly tell her if she don't, she lose her officer job."
"I'm on go," Minny say, frowning like her chair gotten too hard to sit in.
"Because they know about you getting pregnant that first time. And it makes them mad you getting knocked up and marrying one a their mens."
"They don’t hate me, they hate what they think I did."
"Any normal person would automatically fie on a woman biding for her husband. But I forgot Miss Celia is not a normal person."
"I can’t do this to Johnny anymore. I’ve already decided, Minny. I’m going back to Sugar Ditch."
"None of this would’ve happened if I’d just stayed where I belonged."
"I’ll see you tonight. I’m so glad you’ll be there so I’ll have somebody to talk to."
"Just stay home, fool, is what I want to say to her, but I don’t."
"But it was Lulabelle acting that way. Not Constantine."
"Your daddy didn’t die. He left the day after you were born."
"She had to give me away. You can’t keep us apart."
"It’s like no one wants to be the first to break the silence."
"It’s time you learned, Eugenia, how things really are."
"I WRITE ALL NIGHT, grimacing over the details of Minny’s story, and all the next day."
"Your mother has cancer, Eugenia. In the lining of the stomach."
"It's like true love, good help. You only get one in a lifetime."
"I am calling Fanny Mae's the minute I can walk to the kitchen and make your hair appointments through 1975."
"They say it's like true love, good help. You only get one in a lifetime."
"It’s a gift from God, I guess. So they can go on and finish their business."
"The gravity of sitting upright, we’ve learned, helps keep the vomit down."
"You’re too smart to get mixed up in anything like that."
"I’m not making trouble, Stuart. The trouble is already here."
"I don’t…think I can marry somebody I don’t know."
"I look up at him, feeling very hot all of a sudden."
"Despite what he thinks he "knows" about me, I can’t help but appreciate that someone out there cares enough to stand up for me."
"The most she can do is get up and go to the bathroom or sit on the porch a few minutes every day."
"We’re all pretty sure nothing’s gone be said about it right at first."
"We are three fools in the dining room crying."
"I’m afraid to hit back. I’m afraid he’ll leave me if I do."
"It’s time for me to retire. You my last little girl."
"Law, tell me she ain’t saying what I think she saying—"