The Help by Kathryn Sockett

• The day your child says she hates you, and every child will go through the phase, it kicks like a foot in the stomach.
• My real dream was that one day I would write something that people would actually read.
• Ugly live up on 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?
• All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
• What would happen if I told her she something good, ever day?
• Dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town.
• I feel guilty for not being nicer to her, for not needing her until my own life turns bad.
• White people been representing colored opinions since the beginning a time.
• My motto on housekeeping: when in doubt, wash it out.
• It was a accident. Kicking her ain't gone do us no good.
• Saying thank you, when you really mean it, when you remember what someone done for you, it's so good.
• Stuart needs "space" and "time," as if this were physics and not a human relationship.
• Everybody care. Black, white, deep down we all do.
• It ain't the color a the wrapping that count, it's what we is inside.
• 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.
• Not only is they lines, but you know good as I do where them lines be drawn. I used to believe in em. I don't anymore. They in our heads. People make us believe they there. But they ain't.
• Kindness don't have no boundaries.
• I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.
• Sorry is the fool who ever underestimates my mother.
• I am looking for a future for myself. I like to hear about the possibilities of others.
• 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.
• When she do things, they done the first time.
• Trying to understand is vital to our humanity.

7/16/2011