Not only is it Black History Month, but today also happens to be the publishing date for Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. We’re celebrating both of these anniversaries with a list of the most uplifting quotes from this powerful novel.
“You is kind, you is smart, you is important.”
“All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.”
“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
“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?”
“That’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going.”
“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.”
“…and that’s when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?”
“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”
“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.”
“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”
“And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just lie.”
“And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.”
“Ugly live upon the inside. Ugly be a hurtful mean person…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?…With Constantine’s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
And finally, a quote that Stockett included in her summary- from Grady’s Gift by Howell Raine:
“There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.”