The Help Quotes to Inspire You (125+)

In this blog post, we collected the most inspirational The Help quotes.

The movie 

The Help is an emotional drama, told with humor and hope, about friendship, courage and especially about the power to inspire social change.

The action takes place in Jackson, Mississippi, in the ’60s.

The story depicts the relationship that is built between three different but extraordinary women, a friendship hard to imagine, strengthened around a secret editorial project, which violates social norms and puts the three women at great risk.

Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan has just graduated from college and is writing a home care tip in a local newspaper, helped by Aibileen, the maid of a good friend.

Soon, the young journalist starts a clandestine project, inspired by the life stories of Aibileen and Minny Jackson, his good friend, who face the same problems. 

The three women whisper their stories, overturn the social rules of those times and thus expose themselves to the risk of being marginalized by the society in which they live.

The whispered but courageous revelations of the protagonists thus turn into the editorial project that underlies some social changes.

In this way, the three characters make their voices heard and, at the same time, reveal the social condition of the maids of color, a taboo subject for those times.

The film has a remarkable cast, Emma Stone (“Easy A”, “Zombieland”) plays the brave Skeeter, Viola Davis, winner of the Tony Award and nominated for Academy Awards (for “Doubt” and “Eat, pray, love”) she plays the powerful Aibileen, and the talkative Minny Jackson is played by the talented actress Octavia Spencer (“Dinner for Schmucks”, “Seven Pounds”).

The film is based on the eponymous novel, “The Help”, a bestseller released in 2009 and praised by critics, which remained in the Top “New York Times” of best-selling books for 103 weeks. The novel is also being published by Univers Publishing House and will most likely appear on the market at the end of November.

5 The Help Quotes

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

2. “Every morning, until you are dead in the ground, you have to make this decision. You have to ask yourself, “Am I gonna believe what these fools say about me today?”

3. “I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.”

4. “All I’m saying is, kindness don’t have no boundaries.”

5. “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.”

 15 The Help Quotes

1. “Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
2. “Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”
3. “Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person.”
4. “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.”
5. “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.”
6. “I’m sorry, but were you dropped on your head as an infant?”
7. “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.”
8. “That’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going.”
9. “I’d cry, if only I had the time to do it.”
10. “Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.”
11. “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.”
12. “…and that’s when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?”
13. “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.”

14. “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.”
15. “it always sound scarier when a hollerer talk soft.”

25 The Help Quotes

1. “Frying chicken always makes me feel a little better about life.”
2. “No one tells us, girls who don’t go on dates, that remembering can be almost as good as what actually happens.”
3. “It seems like at some point you’d run out of awful.”
4. “We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.”
5. “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.”
6. “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.”
7. “….I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
8. “…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.”
9. “Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again.”
10. “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.”
11. “I may not remember my name or what country I live in, but you and that pie is something I will never forget.”
12. “I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain’t a color, disease ain’t the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming – and it come in ever white child’s life – when they start to think that colored folks ain’t as good as whites. … I pray that wasn’t her moment, Pray I still got time.”
13. “And you call yourself a Christian,’ were Hilly’s words to me and I thought, God. When did I ever do that?”
14. “When you little, you only get asked two questions, what’s your name and how old you is, so you better get em right.”
15. “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.”

18. “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.”
19. “He needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”
20. “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.”

21. “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.”

22. “The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.”

23. “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.”
24. “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.”

25. “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.”

35 The Help Quotes

1. “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.”

2. “Who knew paper and ink could be so vicious”

3. “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.”

4. “If you in the morning Throw minutes away, you can’t pick them up in the course of a day. You may hurry and scurry, and flurry and worry, you’ve lost them forever, forever and aye.”
5. “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.”

6. “That’s all a grit is, a vehicle. For whatever it is you rather be eating.”

7. “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.”

8. “She dumb.” I sigh. “But she ain’t stupid.”

9. “Babies love fat.”

10. “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.”

11. “Got to be the worst place in the world, inside a oven. You in here, you either cleaning or you getting cooked.”
12. “Mrs. Charlotte Phelan’s Guide to Husband-Hunting, Rule Number One: a pretty, petite girl should accentuate with makeup and good posture. A tall plain one, with a trust fund.”
13. “I looked after that Dudley family for too long, over six years. His daddy would take him to the garage and whip him with a rubber hose-pipe trying to beat the girl out a that boy until I couldn’t stand it no more…. I wish to God I’d told John Green Dudley he ain’t going to hell. That he ain’t no sideshow freak cause he like boys. I wish to God I’d filled his ears with good things like I’m trying to do with Mae Mobley. Instead, I just sat in the kitchen, waiting to put the salve on them hose-pipe welts.”
14. “You’re gon’ have to say to your self, am I gon’ believe what them fools say about me today?”
15. “We go on in her room, where we like to set. I get up in the big chair and she get up on me and smile, bounce a little. “Tell me bout the brown wrapping. And the present.” She so excited, she squirming. She has to jump off my lap, squirm a little to get it out. Then she crawl back up.

That’s her favorite story cause when I tell it, she get two presents. I take the brown wrapping from my Piggly Wiggly grocery bag and wrap up a little something, like piece a candy, inside. Then I use the white paper from my Cole’s Drug Store bag and wrap another one just like it. She take it real serious, the unwrapping, letting me tell the story bout how it ain’t the color a the wrapping that count, it’s what we is inside.”

16. “I have decided not to die.”
17. “…My sister Doreena who never lifted a royal finger growing up because she had the heart defect that we later found out was a fly on the X-ray machine. ”
18. “They say it’s like true love, good help. You only get one in a lifetime.”
19. “And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just lie.”
20. “She’s got so many azalea bushes, her yard’s going to look like Gone With the Wind come spring. I don’t like azaleas and I sure didn’t like that movie, the way they made subjugation look like a big happy tea party. If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green draperies up her white little pooper. Maker her own damn man-catching dress.”
21. “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.”
22. “Rich folk don’t try so hard”
23. “Oh, it was delicious to have someone to keep secrets with…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.”
24. “I haven’t had the chance to look at too many men’s faces up close. And I noticed how his skin was thicker than mine, and a gorgeous shade of toast. The stiff blond hairs on his cheeks and chin seemed to be growing before my eyes. He smelled like starch. Like pine. His nose wasn’t so pointy afterall. …And 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.”
25. “I’ve become one of those people who prowl around at night in their cars. God, I am the town’s Boo Radley, just like in To Kill A Mockingbird.”
26. “Her nose wrinkle up cause now she got to remember to say she Mae Mobley Three, when her whole life she can remember, she been telling people she Mae Mobley Two. When you little, you only get asked two questions, what’s your name and how old you is, so you better get em right.”
27. “Baby Girl,” I say. “I need you remember everything I told you. Do you remember what I told you?” She still crying steady, but the hiccups are gone. “To wipe my bottom good when I’m done?”

“No, baby, the other one. About who you are.”

28. “Now I had babies confuse before. John Green Dudley, first word out a that boy’s mouth was Mama and he was looking straight at me. But then pretty soon he calling everybody including hisself Mama and calling his daddy Mama too… Nobody worry bout it. Course when he start playing dress-up in his sister’s Jewel Taylor twirl skirts and wearing Chanel No. 5, we all get a little concern.”

29. “Bosoms are for bedrooms and breastfeeding.”
30. “[Crisco] ain’t just for frying. You ever get a sticky something stuck in your hair,like gum?…That’s right, Crisco. Spread this on a baby’s bottom, you won’t even know what diaper rash is…shoot, I seen ladies rub it under they eyes and on they husband’s scaly feet…Clean the goo from a price tag, take the squeak out a door hinge. Lights get cut off, stick a wick in it and burn it like a candle….And after all that, it’ll still fry your chicken.”
31. “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.”
32. “This woman talk like she from so deep in the country she got corn growing in her shoes.”

33. “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, something we both knew meant ‘Listen to me.’ “Every 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.”

34. “I intend to stay on her like hair on soap.”

  “And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.”

45 The Help Quotes

1. “They say it’s like true love, good help. you only get one in a lifetime…..there is so much you don’t know about a person. I wonder if I could’ve made her days a little bit easier, if I’d tried. if i’d treated her a little nicer…..”

2. “She already got the blue dress on I ironed this morning, the one with sixty-five pleats on the waist, so tiny I got to squint through my glasses to iron. I don’t hate much in life, but me and that dress is not on good terms.”
3. “Stuart stands and says, ‘Come here,’ and he’s on my side of the room in one stride and he claps my hands to his hips and kisses my mouth like I am the drink he’s been dying for all day and I’ve heard girls say it’s like melting, that feeling. But I think it’s like rising, growing even taller and seeing sights over a hedge, colors you’ve never seen before.”
4. “The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.”
5. “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.”

6. “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.”
7. “Here’s to new beginnings,” Stuart says and raises his bourbon.

I nod, sort of wanting to tell him that all beginnings are new.”

8.  “Bosoms are for bedrooms and breastfeeding. Not for occasions with dignity.”

9. “I wait on white ladies who walk right out the bedroom wearing nothing but they personality…”

10. “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.(Howell Raines’s Pulitzer Prize winning article “Grady’s Gift”)-Sockett admired this quote and used it in her summary…””
11. “She hug me around my neck, say, “You’re righter than Miss Taylor.” I tear up then. My cup is spilling over. Those is new words to me.”

13. “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.”

14. “Rule Number One for working for a white lady, Minny: it is nobody’s business. You keep your nose out of your White Lady’s problems, you don’t go crying to her with yours—you can’t pay the light bill? Your feet are too sore? Remember one thing: white people are not your friends. They don’t want to hear about it. And when Miss White Lady catches her man with the lady next door, you keep out of it, you hear me?”
15. “With other people, Hilly hands out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt, but it’s our own silent agreement, this strict honesty, perhaps the one thing that has kept us friends”
16. “I’m pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn’t something people felt compelled to examine.

I have wished, for many years, that I’d been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question. She died when I was sixteen. I’ve spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book.”

17. “I hear Raleigh’s new accounting business isn’t doing well. Maybe up in New York or somewhere it’s a good thing, but in Jackson, Mississippi, people just don’t care to do business with a rude, condescending —-”

18. “I’m tired of the rules,” I say.”

19. “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. 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.”

20. “Bosoms,” she announces, with a hand to her own, “are for bedrooms and breastfeeding. Not for occasions with dignity.”

21. “Well, what do you want her to do, Eleanor? Leave them at home?”
22. “It’s already 95 degrees outside. Mississippi got the most unorganized weather in the nation.”
23. “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.”
24. “Cause that’s the way prayer do. It’s like electricity, it keeps things going.”

25. “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”

26. “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.”

27. “He let out a long sorry sigh and I love that look on his face, that disappointment. I understand now why girls resist,just for that sweet look of regret….”
28. “But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs “space” and “time,” as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”
29. “President Kennedy’s assassination, less than two weeks ago, has struck the world dumb. It’s like no one wants to be the first to break the silence. Nothing seems important.”
30. “What if I’m stuck. Here. Forever.”
31. “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 

32. “And I know there are plenty of other “colored” things I could do besides telling my stories or going to Shirley Boon’s meetings- the mass meetings in town, the marches in Birmingham, the voting rallies upstate. But truth is, I don’t care that much about voting. I don’t care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver.”

33. “….we ain’t doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.”

34. “In the dark, I get a glimpse of myself from way above, like in a movie. I’ve become one of those people who prowl around at night in their cars. God, I am the town’s Boo Radley, just like in To Kill a Mockingbird”

35. “How tall are you, Constantine?” I asked, unable to hide my tears.

Constantine narrowed her eyes at me.

“How tall is you?”

“Five-eleven,” I cried. “I’m already taller than the boys’ basketball coach.”

“Well, I’m five-thirteen, so quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

36. “I’d rather spend the rest of my life right here in Aibileen’s cozy little kitchen, having her explain the world to me. 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.”
37. “Kindness don’t have no boundaries.”
38. “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. ”

39. “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.”
40. “Minny,” I say last Sunday, “why Bertrina ask me to pray for her?”

Minny say, “Rumor is you got some kind a power prayer, gets better results than just the regular variety.”

41. “Who knew heartbreak would be so hot.”
42. “Because ain’t that white people for you, wondering if they are happy enough.”

43. “When I started typing her bathroom iniative for the newsletter, typing words like disease and protect yourself and you’re welcome! it was like something cracked open inside of me, not unlike a watermelon, cool and soothing sweet. I always thought insanity would be a dark and bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.”

44. “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.”
45. “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.”

50 The Help Quotes

1. “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.”
2. “We done something brave and good here….Maybe [we] don’t want to be deprived a any a the things that go along with being brave and good. Even the bad.”
3. “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.”
4. “I used to be a good fighter.” She looks out along the boxwoods, wipes off her sweat with her palm. “If you’d known me ten years ago…”

She’s got no goo on her face, her hair’s not sprayed, her nightgown’s like an old prairie dress. 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 stuff from nobody.”

5. “I can’t wear a man’s jacket with a ball gown.” She rolls her eyes at him, sighs. But thanks, honey.”
6. “I tucked this away, afraid to admit how good it was to hear it.”
7. “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.”
8. “Why don’t we just build you an house outside Hilly?”
9. “…that’s what I want them to know. Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you”
10. “She got a confused, disgusted look on her face, like she done salted her coffee instead a sugared it.”
11. “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”
12. “I don’t regret it, but I don’t feel quite as lucky anymore.”

13. “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.”

14. “It’s alive and well everywhere. Native Americans get a lot of stuff in the West and south west. Muslims get treated bad in just about every country in the Western world lately. Black people are mistreated in some parts of the US still.

I’ve even encountered discrimination from people over seas for being American. Especially with my cousin’s friends from England. They were rude to me the entire visit. They thought that I had to be an ignorant, xenophobic, racist slob just because I was from America and they spent most of the time trying to pick a fight with me to prove it.

Racism exists, but don’t take the comments you read online seriously. A good 80-90% of those are trolls looking for attention or a bored teenager who thinks it’s funny to be an idiot.”

15. “Tonight, I’ll strip off all this armor and let it be as it was before..”
16. “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.”
17. “A course we different! Everybody know colored people and white people ain’t the same. But we still just people.”
18. “Find I can get my point across a lot better writing them down”
19. “Miss Skeeter say maybe don’t spec nothing at all, that most Southern peoples is “repressed.” If they feel something, they might not say a word. Just hold they breath and wait for it to pass, like gas.”
20. “It’s Tuesday, change-the-damn-sheets day. If I don’t do it today, that makes Wednesday change-the-damn-sheets day too.”
21. “For a minute, we’re just two people wondering why things are the way they are.”
22. “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.”
23. “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.”
24. “He moves closer and leans down so I will look at him. And I feel sick, literally nauseated by the smell of bourbon on his breath. And yet I still want to fold myself up and put my entire body in his arms. I am loving him and hating him at the same time.”
25. “For four days straights, I sit at my typewriter in my bedroom. Twenty of my typed pages, full of slashes and red-circled edits, become thirty-one in thick Strathmore white.”
26. “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.”
27. “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.”
28. “she clear her throat again and I’m wondering why she telling me all this. I’m the maid, she ain’t gone win no friends talking to me.”
29. “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”
30. “If I’d played Mammy, I’d of told Scarlett to stick those green draperies up her white little pooper. Make her own damn man-catching dress. -Minny”
31. “I guess we all get a little snippy when we’re not feeling good.”
32. “Sure, I dreamed of football dates, buy my real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actually read”
33. “Look around, investigate, and write. Don’t waste your time on the obvious things. Write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else.”
34. “…and it’s a strange thing happening here cause nobody saying nothing and we still managing to have us a conversation.”
35. “I set her on her wooden baby seat so her little hiney don’t fall in and soon as I turn my back, she off “
36. “She blow em clean over. She suck the grits off the candle and start eating. After while, she smile up at me, say, “How old are you?”
37. “If I didn’t hit you Minny, who knows what you become.”
38. “Maybe I ain’t too old to start over, I think and I laugh and cry at the same time at this. Cause just last night I thought I was finished with everything new.”
39. “Never give up. The same manuscript may appeal to one agent and not to another. It’s a matter of taste, and it’s all about the writing.

What if I had give up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60?

The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere.”

40. “Someone whose eyes simply said, without words, You are fine with me.”

41. “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 futures. 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 says it, just like I need her to. “You is kind,” she say, “you is smart. You is important.”

42. “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?”
43. “You are a beautiful person”
44. “You kind, you smart, you important.”
45. “…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.”
46. “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.”
47. “I’ve been dropped off in a place I do not belong anymore. Certainly not here with Mother and Daddy,…”
48. “Lot a folks think if you talk back to you husband, you crossed the line. And that justifies punishment. You believe that line?”

I scowl down at the table. “You know I ain’t studying no line like that.”

“Cause that line ain’t there. Except in Leroy’s head. Lines between black and white ain’t there either. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and society ladies too.”

49. “I used to believe in ’em [lines]. 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.” – Aibileen”
50. “Some things I just got to keep for myself.”

Other Mental health quotes which you may like

Below are other mental health quotes which may be of interest to you:

Introvert quotes

Intuition Quotes

Iron Man Quotes

It Quotes

January quotes and poems

Jim Carrey Quotes

Joe Rogan quotes

June Quotes

Conclusions 

With an exceptional cast that includes Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, The Help is a bold story, full of humor and hope, about the power to bring about a change in outdated and racist mentalities.

Which The Help quote inspired you most? Let us know in the comments section!