Top 100 Kathryn Stockett Quotes
#1. But certainly in my grandmother's time - and when I was growing up, yeah, Demetrie's bathroom was on the side of the house, it was a separate door. Still, to this day, I've never been in that room.
Kathryn Stockett
#3. I think about how no one in the car would come out and say it. We all know about these laws, we live here, but we don't talk about them. This is the first time I've ever seen them written down.
Kathryn Stockett
#4. I want to read what you're thinking. I'm pretty sure it's not about housekeeping.
Kathryn Stockett
#5. Got to be the worst place in the world, inside a oven. You in here, you either cleaning or you getting cooked.
Kathryn Stockett
#7. Having a separate bathroom for the black domestic was just the way things were done. It had faded out in new homes by the time the '70s and '80s rolled up.
Kathryn Stockett
#9. Babies like fat. Like to bury they face up in you armpit and go to sleep. They like big fat legs too. That I know.
Kathryn Stockett
#10. Mississippi and the world is two different places,' the Deacon say and we all nod cause ain't it the truth.
Kathryn Stockett
#11. She kind a laugh and it hurts my heart. Because everbody care. Black, white, deep down we all do.
Kathryn Stockett
#12. I may not remember my name or what country I live in, but you and that pie is something I will never forget.
Kathryn Stockett
#14. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#15. Sure, I dreamed of football dates, buy my real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actually read
Kathryn Stockett
#16. Because I long to feel nothing. I want to be frozen inside. I want the icy cold to blow directly on my heart.
Kathryn Stockett
#18. Be the prettiest book I ever seen. The cover is pale blue, color a the sky. And a big white bird - a peace dove - spreads its wings from end to end.
Kathryn Stockett
#19. No, white women like to keep their hands clean. They got a shiny little set a tools they use, sharp as witches' fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gonna take they time with em.
Kathryn Stockett
#20. Taking care a white babies, that's what I do, along with all the cooking and the cleaning. I done raised seventeen kids in my lifetime. I know how to get them babies to sleep, stop crying, and go in the toilet bowl before they mamas even get out a bed in the morning.
Kathryn Stockett
#21. That's the way prayer do. It's like electricity, it keeps things going.
Kathryn Stockett
#22. That's what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you
Kathryn Stockett
#23. I sit in my little office and I feel like I've got all my readers staring at me.
Kathryn Stockett
#24. What you learn today?" I ask even though she ain't in real school, just the pretend kind. Other day, when I ask her, she say, "Pilgrims. They came over and nothing would grow so they ate the Indians."
Now knew them Pilgrims didn't eat no Indians. But that ain't the point.
Kathryn Stockett
#25. I think if you're president, color goes away completely: you're president and it doesn't matter if you're white, green or purple.
Kathryn Stockett
#26. I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you'd just run out of awful.
Kathryn Stockett
#27. I don't know what to say to her. All I know is, I ain't saying it. And I know she ain't saying what she want a say either and it's a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation.
Kathryn Stockett
#28. What should we do about it?" asks Miss Celia.
We. God forgive me, but I wish there wasn't a "we" mixed up in this. (Minny)
Kathryn Stockett
#29. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#31. It weren't too loo long before I seen something in me, had changed. A bitter seed was planted inside of me. And I just didn't feel so, accepting, anymore.
Kathryn Stockett
#32. And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember - just lie.
Kathryn Stockett
#33. I don't know why the bad have to happen to the goodest ones,
Kathryn Stockett
#34. I'm sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?
Kathryn Stockett
#35. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#36. I am not spending my final days in a hospital, nor will I turn my own house into one." Doctor
Kathryn Stockett
#37. There is nothing else to say, so I just murmur, "I know. Thank you for the chance." And I add, "Merry Christmas, Missus Stein."
"We call it Hanukkah, but thank you, Miss Phelan.
Kathryn Stockett
#38. It can be really powerful to write something when you're sad.
Kathryn Stockett
#39. But Lou Anne, she understood the point of the book before she even read it. The one who was missing the point this time was me.
Kathryn Stockett
#41. When I grew older and awkward, when my parents divorced and life had gone all to hell, Demetrie stood me at the wardrobe mirror and told me over and over, 'You are beautiful. You are smart. You are important.' It was an incredible gift to give a child who thinks nothing of herself.
Kathryn Stockett
#42. It's mighty strange, without a doubt Nobody knows you when you're down and out
Kathryn Stockett
#43. It's so hot, Mister Dunn's rooster walks in my door and squats his red self right in front of my kitchen fan. I come in to find him looking at me like 'I ain't moving nowhere, lady
Kathryn Stockett
#44. They say it's like true love, good help. You only get one in a lifetime.
Kathryn Stockett
#45. When Demetrie got sick, we knew it was our responsibility to take care of her and pay her medical bills. And we embraced that. But the tricky part is, like so many families in the South, we also expected her to use a separate bathroom, to use separate utensils.
Kathryn Stockett
#46. Only three things them ladies talk about: they kids, they clothes, and they friends. I hear the word Kennedy, I know they ain't discussing no politic. They talking about what Miss Jackie done wore on the tee-vee.
Kathryn Stockett
#47. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#48. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#50. She's wearing a tight red sweater and a red skirt and enough makeup to scare a hooker.
Kathryn Stockett
#51. You're the smartest one in the class, Aibileen," she say. "And the only way you're going to keep sharp is to read and write every day.
Kathryn Stockett
#52. She takes a deep breath through her nose and I see it. I see the white-trash girl she was ten years ago. She was strong. She didn't take no shit from nobody. Miss
Kathryn Stockett
#53. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#54. By the time she a year old Mae Mobley following me around everwhere I go ... .Miss Leefolt, she'd narrow up her eyes at me like I done something wrong, unhitch that crying baby off my foot. I reckon that's the risk you run, letting somebody else raise you chilluns
Kathryn Stockett
#55. Which means I have to lie to her on a daily basis, which is in itself enjoyable but a little degrading at the same time
Kathryn Stockett
#56. I've never been happier in my whole life.
I leave it at that. Underneath all that happy, she sure doesn't look happy.
Kathryn Stockett
#57. I can't wear a man's jacket with a ball gown. She rolls her eyes at him, sighs. But thanks, honey.
Kathryn Stockett
#58. 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?
Kathryn Stockett
#59. I'm a Southerner - I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve.
Kathryn Stockett
#60. She's like a Philistine on a Sunday, the way she won't take but so many steps a day. Except every day's Sunday around here.
Kathryn Stockett
#61. All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
Kathryn Stockett
#62. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#63. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#64. The phone ring so I go in the kitchen and answer it. Got a little
Kathryn Stockett
#65. I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
Kathryn Stockett
#67. born on a early Sunday morning in August, 1960. A church baby
Kathryn Stockett
#68. You don't cook pumpkins in the summer, you don't cook peaches in the fall.
Kathryn Stockett
#69. I slip off my flats and walk down the front porch steps, while Mother calls out for me to put my shoes back on, threatening ringworm, mosquito, encephalitis. The inevitability of death by no shoes. Death by no husband.
Kathryn Stockett
#70. Week after Clyde left you I heard that Cocoa wake up to her cootchie spoilt like a rotten oyster. Didn't get better for three months. Bertrina she good friends with Cocoa She knows your prayer works.
Kathryn Stockett
#71. What a dichotomy. What conflicting ideas that we love and embrace these women, and entrust them to raise our children and to feed us and to bathe us, but we keep something as silly as a bathroom separate.
Kathryn Stockett
#72. That's all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.
Kathryn Stockett
#73. I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.
Kathryn Stockett
#74. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#75. I choke then. The tears roll down. It's all them white peoples that breaks me, standing around the colored neighborhood. White peoples with guns, pointed at colored peoples. Cause who gone protect our peoples? Ain't no colored policemans.
Kathryn Stockett
#76. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#77. Frying chicken always makes me feel a little better about life.
Kathryn Stockett
#78. I guess we all get a little snippy when we're not feeling good.
Kathryn Stockett
#79. No one tells us, girls who don't go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.
Kathryn Stockett
#80. Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.
Kathryn Stockett
#81. On the one hand I wonder, Was this really my story to tell? On the other hand, I just wanted the story to be told. But the truth is that I didn't think anybody was going to read it.
Kathryn Stockett
#82. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.
Kathryn Stockett
#83. And you call yourself a Christian,' were Hilly's words to me and I thought, God. When did I ever do that?
Kathryn Stockett
#84. 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.
Kathryn Stockett
#85. Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.
Kathryn Stockett
#86. Down in the national news section, there's an article on a new pill, the 'Valium' they're calling it, 'to help women cope with everyday challenges.' God, I could use about ten of those little pills right now.
Kathryn Stockett
#87. I'm really incredibly stubborn - you can ask my ex-husband. I think when you tell me 'no', if it's something I really want, I'm just going to push harder.
Kathryn Stockett
#88. I don't regret it, but I don't feel quite as lucky anymore.
Kathryn Stockett
#90. To say I have frizzy hair is an understatement. It is kinky, more pubic than cranial, and whitish blond, breaking off easily, like hay.
Kathryn Stockett
#91. Ever afternoon, me and Baby Girl set in the. rocking chair before her nap. Ever afternoon, I tell her: You kind, you smart, you important. But she growing up and I know, soon, them few words ain't gone be enough.
Kathryn Stockett
#92. I never once heard her say she gone leave Leroy, and Minny don't say things twice. When she do things, they done the first time.
Kathryn Stockett
#93. Mother says she doesn't need the medication anymore, that the only cure for cancer is having a daughter who won't cut her hair and wears dresses too high above the knee even on a Sunday, because how knows what tackiness I'd do to myself if she died.
Kathryn Stockett
#94. You got nothing left here but enemies in the Junior League and a mama that's gonna drive you to drink. You done burned ever bridge there is. And you ain't never gone get another boyfriend in this town and everbody know it. So don't walk your white butt to New York, run it.
Kathryn Stockett
#95. I've been dropped off in a place I do not belong anymore. Certainly not here with Mother and Daddy, ...
Kathryn Stockett
#96. Bosoms," she announces, with a hand to her own, "are for bedrooms and breastfeeding. Not for occasions with dignity."
"Well, what do you want her to do, Eleanor? Leave them at home?
Kathryn Stockett
#98. I shake my head at my friend. "Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn." Aibileen shakes her head. "I used to believe in em. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People like Miss Hilly is always trying to make us believe they there. But they ain't.
Kathryn Stockett
#99. I do wish that people talked about the subject of race, especially in the South.
Kathryn Stockett
#100. I have never been more proud of the United States than I am this year. We have elected an African-American president. We have the stellar Michelle Obama setting the standard for American women. I simply cannot say it enough: look how far we've come.
Kathryn Stockett
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