The Help is a novel about black maids working in white homes in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s.
The stories of the maids wouldn’t be told if it wasn’t for Miss Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan.
Skeeter is a 22-year-old college graduate who returns to her family’s cotton plantation and finds that her maid and nanny, Constantine, has gone, and no one will tell her why she left.
Skeeter wants to be a writer, but her only job offer is to write a housekeeping advice column for the Jackson Journal.
Because she knows little about writing, she asks her friend’s maid, Aibileen, for advice.
But she also discovers what happened to Constantine and the secrets of the maid’s white bosses.
With the help of the maids, Skeeter writes an anonymous book that gives the black maids a powerful voice.
The Help Quotes With Page Numbers
“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, The Help, Chapter 1, Page 3
“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, The Help, Chapter 1, Page 3
“That’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 2, Page 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, The Help, Chapter 2, Page 35
“She’s wearing a tight red sweater and a red skirt and enough makeup to scare a hooker.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 3, Page 50
“The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 4, Page 60
“Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 5, Page 73
“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, The Help, Chapter 5, Page 73
“The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton’s over to shoot guns in the field.
‘Why you crying, girl?’ Constantine asked me in the kitchen.
I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face.
‘Well? Is you?’
I blinked, paused my crying. ‘Is I what?’
‘Now you look a here, Egenia’-because constantien was the only one who’d occasionally follow Mama’s rule. ‘Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so,’ I sobbed.
Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, somthing we both knew meant Listen. Listen to me.
‘Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision.’
Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. ‘You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?’
She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother’s white child. 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, The Help, Chapter 5, Pages 73-74
“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, The Help, Chapter 5, Page 74
“Oh, it was delicious to have someone to keep secrets with. If I’d had a sister or a brother closer in age, I guessed that’s what it would be like. But it wasn’t just smoking or skirting around Mother. It was having someone look at you after your mother has nearly fretted herself to death because you are freakishly tall and frizzy and odd. Someone whose eyes simply said, without words, You are fine with me.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 5, Page 76
“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, The Help, Chapter 5, Page 78
“I head down the steps to see if my mail-order copy of Catcher in the Rye is in the box. 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, The Help, Chapter 6, Page 82
“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, The Help, Chapter 6, Page 82
“Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 6, Page 83
“…and that’s when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 7, Page 107
“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 8, Page 123
“I’m sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 9, Page 139
“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.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 10, Page 151
“I give in and light another cigarette even though last night the surgeon general came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody, trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once told me tongue kissing would turn me blind and I’m starting to think it’s all just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sure no one ever has any fun.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 11, Page 173
“I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month’s worth a light bill for. I guess that’s when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. 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.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 11, Pages 175-176
“No one tells us, girls who don’t go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 13, Page 199
“…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, The Help, Chapter 13, Pages 200-201
“Womens, they ain’t like men. A woman ain’t gone beat you with a stick. Miss Hilly wouldn’t pull no pistol on me. Miss Leefolt wouldn’t come burn my house down. No, white womens like to keep they hands clean. They got a shiny little set of tools they use, sharp as witches’ fingernails, tidy and laid out neat, like the picks on a dentist tray. They gone take they time with em.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 14, Page 220
“Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don’t know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 14, Page 225
“it always sound scarier when a hollerer talk soft.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 14, Page 229
“Once upon a time they was two girls,” I say. “one girl had black skin, one girl had white.”
Mae Mobley look up at me. She listening.
“Little colored girl say to 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?’
“But neither one a them little girls knew. So little white girl say, ‘Well, let’s see. You got hair, I got hair.'”I gives Mae Mobley a little tousle on her head.
“Little colored girl say ‘I got a nose, you got a nose.'”I gives her little snout a tweak. She got to reach up and do the same to me.
“Little white girl say, ‘I got toes, you got toes.’ And I do the little thing with her toes, but she can’t get to mine cause I got my white work shoes on.
“‘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.”
Baby Girl just look at me. Law, that was a sorry story if I ever heard one. Wasn’t even no plot to it. But Mae Mobley, she smile and say, “Tell it again.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 15, Page 234
“Frying chicken always makes me feel a little better about life.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 17, Page 263
“I worked for Miss Margaret thirty-eight years. She had her a baby girl with the colic and the only thing that stopped the hurting was to hold her. So I made me a wrap. I tied her up on my waist, toted her around all day with me for a entire year. That baby like to break my back. Put ice packs on it ever night and still do. But I loved that girl. And I loved Miss Margaret.
Miss Margaret always made me put my hair up in a rag, say she know coloreds don’t wash their hair. Counted ever piece a silver after I done the polishing. When Miss Margaret die of the lady problems thirty years later, I go to the funeral. Her husband hug me, cry on my shoulder. When it’s over, he give me a envelope. Inside a letter from Miss Margaret reading,
‘Thank you. For making my baby stop hurting. I never forgot it.’
Callie takes off her black-rimmed glasses, wipes her eyes.
If any white lady reads my story, that’s what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you-she shakes her head, stares down at the scratched table-it’s so good.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 19, Page 306
“He needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 21, Page 325
“Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 21, Page 326
“When you little, you only get asked two questions, what’s your name and how old you is, so you better get em right.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 22, Page 333
“That’s all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 22, Page 334
“Today I’m on tell you bout a man from outer space.” She just loves hearing about peoples from outer space. Her favorite show on the tee-vee is My Favorite Martian, I pull on my antennae hats I shaped last night out a tin foil, fasten em on our heads. One for her and one for me. We look like we a couple a crazy people in them things.
“One day, a wise Martian come down to Earth to teach us people a thing or two,” I say.
“Martian? How big?”
“oh, he about six-two.”
“What’s his name?”
“Martian Luther King.”
She take a deep breath and lean her head down on my shoulder. I feel her three-year-old heart racing against mine, flapping like butterflies on my white uniform.
“He was a real nice Martian, Mister King. Looked just like us, nose, mouth, hair up on his head, but sometime people looked at him funny and sometime, well, I guess sometime people was just downright mean.”
I coul get in a lot a trouble telling her these little stories, especially with Mister Leefolt. But
Mae Mobley know these our “secret stories”.
“Why Aibee? Why was they so mean to him?” she ask.
“Cause he was green.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 23, Pages 349-350
“It seems like at some point you’d run out of awful.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 24, Page 365
“All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 24, Page 368
“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, The Help, Chapter 24, Page 369
“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, The Help, Chapter 25, Page 391
“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, The Help, Chapter 27, Page 406
“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, The Help, Chapter 27, Page 407
“And you call yourself a Christian,’ were Hilly’s words to me and I thought, God. When did I ever do that?”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 27, Page 407
“I’d cry, if only I had the time to do it.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 27, Page 417
“Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 27, Page 420
“Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 27, Page 421
“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.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 33, Page 492
“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 33, Page 492
“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, The Help, Chapter 33, Page 499
“Baby Girl,” I say. “I need you to remember everything I told you. Do you remember what I told you?”
She still crying steady, but the hiccups is gone. “To wipe my bottom good when I’m done?”
“No, baby, the other. About what you are.”
I look deep into her rich brown eyes and she look into mine. Law, she got old-soul eyes, like she done lived a thousand years. And I swear I see, down inside, the woman she gone grow up to be. A flash from the future. She is tall and straight. She is proud. She got a better haircut. And she is remembering the words I put in her head. Remembering as a full grown woman.
And then she say it, just like I need her to. “You is kind,” she say, “you is smart. You is important.”~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 34, Page 520
“You is kind…You is smart. You is important.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Chapter 34, Page 521
“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.”
~Kathryn Stockett, The Help, Too Little, Too Late, Page 528