Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

#1. The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it's already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it's nothing like that, but what they mean is they can't remember when.

Helen Oyeyemi

#2. Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy ...

Helen Oyeyemi

#3. They tried their best with each other, but it just wasn't any good.

Helen Oyeyemi

#4. When I saw you for the first time, I thought you had a secret life.

Helen Oyeyemi

#5. White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.

Helen Oyeyemi

#6. I don't think anything can help me socially, to be honest: I have this terrible personality. I don't really know how to describe it ... maybe I'll go with surly.

Helen Oyeyemi

#7. It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling way possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love.

Helen Oyeyemi

#8. Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. You understand?

Helen Oyeyemi

#9. It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

Helen Oyeyemi

#10. Juju is not enough to protect you. Everything you have I will turn against you. I'll turn sugar bitter for you. I'll take your very shield and crack it on your head.

Helen Oyeyemi

#11. Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn't real.

Helen Oyeyemi

#12. Mami answers and her voice is hoarse and thin, and i think fight me better than this.

Helen Oyeyemi

#13. Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She's my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.

Helen Oyeyemi

#14. Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today." Presence

Helen Oyeyemi

#15. I feel like an old lady; my hero is Miss Marple.

Helen Oyeyemi

#16. The first book I really loved was 'Little Women' - I'd have given anything for Beth to have been allowed to live; I remember crying very much over her death, trying to make the words change just by staring at them. I loved 'Anne of Green Gables,' too; 'What Katy Did;' and 'Peter Pan.'

Helen Oyeyemi

#17. So her missing person's poster features a girl with long hair and dreamy eyes that don't see the fracture coming.

Helen Oyeyemi

#18. Be bad. Be wicked. And you should worry. But don't.

Helen Oyeyemi

#19. Maybe she grew one more in the night and that's why the night sleep was so deep, it was a matching pair of sleeps. -

Helen Oyeyemi

#20. The way I live now is that I only write, which means that I'm very poor but very happy. Everything in my life is the way I want it to be.

Helen Oyeyemi

#21. According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well.

Helen Oyeyemi

#22. To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill.

Helen Oyeyemi

#23. She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.

Helen Oyeyemi

#24. She doesn't complain about anything I do; she is physically unable to. That's because I fixed her early. I told her in heartfelt tones that one of the reasons I love her is because she never complains. So now of course she doesn't dare complain.

Helen Oyeyemi

#25. School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it's getting better or worse. But really it's the same thing for years and years.

Helen Oyeyemi

#26. I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.'

Helen Oyeyemi

#27. Katherine, I could die horribly here in this chair, and my blood could spray all over the room and cover the pages of that fascinating book you're reading, and I believe, that you'd just wipe the worst away and keep going.

Helen Oyeyemi

#28. Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze.

Helen Oyeyemi

#29. I've read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob.

Helen Oyeyemi

#30. Why do people go to these places, these places that are not for them? It must be that they believe in their night vision. They believe themselves able to draw images up out of the dark. But black wells only yield black water.

Helen Oyeyemi

#31. There was such an interesting exchange rate in this woman's mind...whenever she remembered anyone giving her anything, they only gave a very little and kept the lion's share to themselves. But whenever she remembered giving anyone anything she gave a lot, so much it almost ruined her.

Helen Oyeyemi

#32. I can't explain, maybe it isn't something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done.

Helen Oyeyemi

#33. Would that be dangerous, to not look while being looked at?

Helen Oyeyemi

#34. Other things my best friend said to me: That two years was but a short span.

Helen Oyeyemi

#35. But also ... I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with.

Helen Oyeyemi

#36. You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and when you arrive they put you in prison and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered they send you back.

Helen Oyeyemi

#37. But then some people give off a strange sense of preoccupation, as if there is something in their lives so important to them that they have to keep it silent, and close. And to keep this thing close, they make sacrifices.

Helen Oyeyemi

#38. I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

Helen Oyeyemi

#39. She found a mirror and turned around in front of it with her arms held out in front of her. She was all there, all in one piece. Then what? What had she lost?

Helen Oyeyemi

#40. Daphne came in with her arms full of books, and her eyes blazing like two poisoned moons. How'd you like the mess St. John?

Helen Oyeyemi

#41. Cities are fueled by the listless agony of workers providing services to other workers who barely acknowledge those services.

Helen Oyeyemi

#42. With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap - that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening.

Helen Oyeyemi

#43. You feel you've seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.

Helen Oyeyemi

#44. It was much more difficult to be alarmed by the events of a day that was almost over.

Helen Oyeyemi

#45. How long had the Doc been crazy? I don't know. Quite some time, I guess. Don't worry. He was only a general practitioner.

Helen Oyeyemi

#46. So Mr. Pizarsky had been a poet? That was how he'd said it: "I was a poet." As if the poet had died. He was hiding, perhaps.

Helen Oyeyemi

#47. Sometimes I say terrible things to him because I don't want him to know I'm sad; sometimes I fly off the handle to hide the fact that I don't know what I'm talking about. And other times
too often, maybe
I don't dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone.

Helen Oyeyemi

#48. Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it's what they want to see. I don't.

Helen Oyeyemi

#49. I love taking things out of context and playing with them and chopping up rules.

Helen Oyeyemi

#50. She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who'd just come from the future but didn't want to brag about it.

Helen Oyeyemi

#51. I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.

Helen Oyeyemi

#52. I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.

Helen Oyeyemi

#53. The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.

Helen Oyeyemi

#54. Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.

Helen Oyeyemi

#55. The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Chapter 12 title)

Helen Oyeyemi

#56. Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesn't go in the order we perceive it. There are ... repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.

Helen Oyeyemi

#57. I remember that I used to get lots of books from the library, and 'Little Women' was one of them. And I used to just cross out the parts of it that really upset me because it's such a sad book in so many ways. I'd cross out the parts that upset me, and I would rewrite new endings.

Helen Oyeyemi

#58. After half an hour the Senora emerged, short of breath, with flushed cheeks....as uf she'd been seized and shaken like a faulty thermometer.

Helen Oyeyemi

#59. I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now I've decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.

Helen Oyeyemi

#60. I said that as far as I could gather it was a tale about a woman who could be led out of captivity only by a man, and that the man could save her only by ignoring her.

Helen Oyeyemi

#61. I have loved a fool who counted kisses, she thought.

Helen Oyeyemi

#62. Were those exact words said: 'I no longer love you'?"
"No."
"No. Hardly anybody ever says it like that, do they? They simply become unkind.

Helen Oyeyemi

#63. I'd have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place.

Helen Oyeyemi

#64. But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order . . ." "And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work." "It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?" He

Helen Oyeyemi

#65. The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it's ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.

Helen Oyeyemi

#66. I tend to prioritize emotional realism above the known laws of time and space, and when you do that, it's inevitable that strange things happen. Which can be quite enjoyable, I think.

Helen Oyeyemi

#67. My heart stirring this way and that like so much hot soup,

Helen Oyeyemi

#68. I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I've thought and found all on my own - on my own, not through you.

Helen Oyeyemi

#69. All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn't understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it.

Helen Oyeyemi

#70. However awful the storm of my disappointment, it's a response that belongs to me. It's my heart, after all. My territory, my kingdom. And since I'm the only one with the authority to surrender it, I can also take it back.

Helen Oyeyemi

#71. know the risk I run when I find fault with people more often than I look for something to appreciate. It's like having grit in your eye; you see less and less of the real person standing right in front of you and more and more of the grit in your eye.

Helen Oyeyemi

#72. She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who layed back to back with it in bed.

Helen Oyeyemi

#73. Oh, everyone's got a view, haven't they? .. Everyone's got something to say, she'd tell me..

Helen Oyeyemi

#74. I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed.

Helen Oyeyemi

#75. It turns out that the average annoyed American only needs to pull three terrible faces before she feels better.

Helen Oyeyemi

#76. White-flowered shrubs thickened around her and so did sleep; it directed her limbs. Lie down now, sleep said sweetly. Lie down. These are the secret hours of the day, the time that owls and bats take to themselves. The stars change places now; let them. You lie down.

Helen Oyeyemi

#77. For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they're around mirrors.

Helen Oyeyemi

#78. Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.

Helen Oyeyemi

#79. And in time, and by being a good woman, and a patient woman, she would have won a good and patient man.

Helen Oyeyemi

#80. And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.

Helen Oyeyemi

#81. Home is where your teapots are.

Helen Oyeyemi

#82. The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven't got an attitude problem.

Helen Oyeyemi

#83. I've been so afraid of getting closeness wrong, because I don't know how to do it, because I don't know what my mistakes reveal
maybe they reveal very good reasons for my having been unloved as a child, I just don't know.

Helen Oyeyemi

#84. He kissed me like ice cream, like a jazz waltz, the rough, gentle way the sea washed sand off my skin on the hottest day of the year.

Helen Oyeyemi

#85. I remember Mum repeatedly telling us we had good hearts and good brains. When she said that we'd say 'thanks' and it might have sounded as if we were thanking her for seeing us that way but actually we were thanking her for giving us whatever goodness was in us.

Helen Oyeyemi

#86. I was a real mess at school. I got a bit of a reputation for being the weird girl: the girl who'd go silent randomly and just kind of write down replies to people's questions in a book.

Helen Oyeyemi

#87. A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.

Helen Oyeyemi

#88. Years ago a friend and fellow writer, Nick Antosca, once made a remark about it being best not to threaten, but to simply act. An effective way of going about things, I think.

Helen Oyeyemi

#89. I've always felt happy in my own company. It's only when I get around other people that things get sticky.

Helen Oyeyemi

#90. I've come to think that there's an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

Helen Oyeyemi

#91. This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.

Helen Oyeyemi

#92. Young men ... learn practical skills that set is in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women: Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotance.

Helen Oyeyemi

#93. The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken.

Helen Oyeyemi

#94. Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain's wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation.

Helen Oyeyemi

#95. If I was afraid that something bad would happen, why wait? Why not make it happen now?

Helen Oyeyemi

#96. She had a new bracelet on, stacked with emeralds brighter than her eyes. I hate rich people.

Helen Oyeyemi

#97. In my family, telling stories is just a way of life.

Helen Oyeyemi

#98. She retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. "Firstly, they cut us down," Rowan said. "Secondly they're all insane, though I suppose they can't help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.

Helen Oyeyemi

#99. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.

Helen Oyeyemi

#100. I bought a brown-skinned glove puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman.

Helen Oyeyemi