What conflicting ideas that we love and embrace these women, and entrust them to raise our children and to feed us and to bathe us, but we keep something as silly as a bathroom separate. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
I’m really incredibly stubborn – you can ask my ex-husband. I think when you tell me ‘no’, if it’s something I really want, I’m just going to push harder. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
I sit in my little office and I feel like I’ve got all my readers staring at me. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
When I grew older and awkward, when my parents divorced and life had gone all to hell, Demetrie stood me at the wardrobe mirror and told me over and over, ‘You are beautiful. You are smart. You are important.’ It was an incredible gift to give a child who thinks nothing of herself. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
That white uniform was her ‘pass’ to get into white places with us – the grocery store, the state fair, the movies. Even though this was the 70s and the segregation laws had changed, the ‘rules’ had not. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
Demetrie came to wait on my grandmother in 1955 and stayed for 32 years. It was common, in Mississippi, to have a black domestic cleaning the kitchen, cooking the meals, looking after the white children. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, ‘Look how far we’ve come,’ because we hadn’t come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson’s population was half white and half black, I didn’t have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
As children, we looked up to our maids and our nannies, who were playing in some ways the role of our mothers. They were paid to be nice to us, to look after us, teach us things and take time out of their day to be with us. As a child you think of these people as an extension of your mother. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn’t have any phone service and we didn’t have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
I’m a Southerner – I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve. I guess if I’m forced to find a good side, I’m glad that people are talking about an issue that hasn’t really been discussed all that much. I’m glad that people are talking about it from the black perspective and the white perspective. Kathryn Stockett Read Quote
