“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”

“But I do not know what to tell myself. Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.”

“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. i...”

“And she is remembering the words I put in her head...."You is kind," she say, "you is smart. You is important.”

“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 - wh...”

“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 ex...”

“People are like M&Ms. They come in a variety of colors, they're hard on the outside, and full of obscene yumminess on the inside.”

“Knowledge was like candy: you never turned it down, especially if you didn't have to work too hard to get it.”

“She grinned, looking for all the world like a sticky-mouthed little girl who had just convinced her gullible mother that she really did drop the first piece of candy into the storm drain and would ...”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”

“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...Everything is war. Me say war.That until the're no longer 1st class and...”

“When youre sharing a foxhole with another man, you don't worry about what color he is, just whether or not he will protect your back”

“And Charles turned around and called back without thinking, 'You know, you're awfully lucky you boys are white.'He didn't know why he said it. It had broken out of him. He'd wanted to speak with lo...”