“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“...and that's when I get to wondering, what would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?”

“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...”

“We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to resc...”

“The rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.”

“Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must at that moment become the center of the universe.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”

“If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant...”

“The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvat...”