The Help: Favorite Passages?

[Rachel-K]

There are many wonderful lines, images, scenes, and passages in the novel! Please share your favorites.

[Fozzie]

Here are two hilarious lines:

Including my sister Doreena who never lifted a royal finger growing up because she had the heart defect that we later found out was a fly on the X-ray machine.            (pg. 48)

I done won the game with something simple as Crisco.  Came to be a secret joke with us, meaning something you can't dress up no matter how you try.  We start calling his daddy Crisco cause you can't fancy up a man done run off on his family.  Plus he the greasiest no-count you ever known.           (pg. 5)

Kathryn, how do you think these things up?!?  Wonderful!

[aprilh]

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Fozzie wrote:

Here are two hilarious lines:

Including my sister Doreena who never lifted a royal finger growing up because she had the heart defect that we later found out was a fly on the X-ray machine.            (pg. 48)

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I loved this quote too! I couldn't stop laughing!

[Kathryn_Stocke…]

Thanks Laura. 

I really liked the idea of surrounding Minny with lazy people, all her life, making her work harder.   Did you read "Why I Live at the P.O.?" by Eudora Welty?   I kept thinking of the narrator in that story-- she was so frustrated because her uppity, coddled, older sister comes home with a child that she claims she "adopted" and the narrator is furious and no one will listen to her when she tries to tell them that the child was conceived out of wedlock.

It is a hysterical story, if you ever get the chance to read it.

Thanks again for your posts.

KS 

[maude40]

So far my favorite passage in the book is at the bottom page150 and top of 151. "I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth of light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it."      Shame is the white community and the heartache they caused. Yvonne

[Fozzie]

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maude40 wrote:
So far my favorite passage in the book is at the bottom page150 and top of 151. "I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth of light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it."      Shame is the white community and the heartache they caused. Yvonne

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Very moving!

[Fozzie]

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Kathryn_Stockett wrote:

I really liked the idea of surrounding Minny with lazy people, all her life, making her work harder.   Did you read "Why I Live at the P.O.?" by Eudora Welty?   I kept thinking of the narrator in that story-- she was so frustrated because her uppity, coddled, older sister comes home with a child that she claims she "adopted" and the narrator is furious and no one will listen to her when she tries to tell them that the child was conceived out of wedlock.

It is a hysterical story, if you ever get the chance to read it.

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When Eudora Welty died (about five years ago?), there was an article in the newspaper about her that I clipped and I thought to myself, "I have to read some of her books."  Well, I haven't yet, but I have heard she is a wonderful southern author.  I think I will nominate one of her books for discussion on the Literature by Women board here on B&N.  Thanks for the suggestion!

[Fozzie]

Page 355: 

"...I think we should call it Colored Domestics and the Southern Families for Which They Work." 

"Say what?"  Minny says, looking at me for the first time.

 "That's the best way to describe it, don't you think?"  I say.

 "If you go a corn cob up you butt."

Gotta love Minny's expressions!