Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Kathryn Stockett

Quote by Kathryn Stockett

“The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton's, over to shoot guns in the field. "Why you crying girl?" Constantine asked me in the kitchen. I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face, "Well? Is you?" I blinked, paused my crying. "Is I what?" "Now you look a here, Eugenia" - because Constantine was the only one who'd occasionally follow Mama's rule. "Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples?" "I don't know. I don't think so." I sobbed. 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. Listen to me.' "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?' 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 what 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.”

Quote by Kathryn Stockett

Book:The Help
Create image

Work

The Help

This book delves into the lives of African-American maids working for white families in Jackson, Mississippi, and the impact of the civil rights movement on their lives. It portrays the struggles and triumphs of these women, their relationships with their employers, and their fight for dignity and equality. more

Author

Kathryn Stockett
Kathryn Stockett

Kathryn Stockett is an American novelist born in 1969. Her debut novel, 'The Help,' published in 2011, quickly became a bestseller and was adapted into a film of the same name. Set in the American South during the 1960s, the novel tells the story of the relationship between black maids and white authors, exploring issues of race relations and social justice. more

You May Also Like

“He recognized a portrait of Einstein because he picked up the characteristic hair and moustache; and the same thing happened with one or two other people. ‘Ach, Paul!’ he said, when shown a portrait of his brother. ‘That square jaw, those big teeth— I would know Paul anywhere!’ But was it Paul he recognized, or one or two of his features, on the basis of which he could make a reasonable guess as to the subject’s identity?”

SelfBrainFamilyHistoryPsychologyNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“...he approached these faces— even of those near and dear—as if they were abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold. No face was familiar to him, seen as a ‘thou’, being just identified as a set of features, an ‘it’. Thus, there was formal, but no trace of personal, gnosis. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression. A face, to us, is a person looking out—we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face.”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“I had stopped at a florist on my way to his apartment and bought myself an extravagant red rose for my buttonhole. Now I removed this and handed it to him. He took it like a botanist or morphologist given a specimen, not like a person given a flower. About six inches in length,’ he commented. ‘A convoluted red form with a linear green attachment.”

SelfBrainPsychologyIdentityNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“It’s just like the eating,’ she explained. ‘I put his usual clothes out, in all the usual places, and he dresses without difficulty, singing to himself. He does everything singing to himself. But if he is interrupted and loses the thread, he comes to a complete stop, doesn’t know his clothes—or his own body. He sings all the time—eating songs, dressing songs, bathing songs, everything. He can’t do anything unless he makes it a song.”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityNeuropsychologyAgnosia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“Jimmie both was and wasn’t aware of this deep, tragic loss in himself, loss of himself. (If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.)”

SelfScienceBrainPsychologyIdentityMemoryNeuroscienceAmnesia
Book:The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Create image

“...he solved all the puzzles, and could solve them easily; and he was far better and sharper than anyone else at games. And as he found this out, he grew fretful and restless again, and wandered the corridors, uneasy and bored and with a sense of indignity—games and puzzles were for children, a diversion. Clearly, passionately, he wanted something to do: he wanted to do, to be, to feel—and could not; he wanted sense, he wanted purpose...”

LifeSelfBrainPsychologyIdentityMemoryAmnesia
Book:Gratitude
Create image