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Helen Oyeyemi Quotes | Quotes said by Helen Oyeyemi

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #1

    The water is very green and has a sweet taste, both boys wrote in their diaries, at different times.


  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #2

    [i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT’S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i]

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #3

    … there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #4

    All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #5

    And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It's better that Charlie and I didn't make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #6

    And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe's head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess - dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship.

    That is not what happened.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #7

    Aside from infrequent comments (Cheer up, love, or It's not Hallo'ween), no one wondered why a teenager was dressed up as a chic governess. Sylvie approved of Miri, even at the same time as she was confused by her. It's a style at least, she said, and took off her rope of pearls and looped them around Miri's neck.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #8

    Because he says he can't stand you and you act like you can't stand him, and whenever a man and a woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something's going on.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #9

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

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #10

    But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruelest way to kill a monster.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #11

    Dear Miranda Silver,
    This house is bigger than you know! There are extra floors, with lots of people in them. They are looking people. They look at you, and they never move. We do not like them. We do not like this house, and we are glad to be going away. This is the end of our letter.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you're not feeling very well, or as a child.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #14

    Finally, he smiled, and although his smile was bumpy because some of his teeth were jagged and broken, it was a warming, infectious smile that was reflected in his eyes. It made her smile widely in return. She felt as if the room had been lit up. He held out his arms, and she went across the room to him, almost running. She buried her face in his shirt, her nose wrinkling up as the scent of his cologne mixed with the nutty, sourish smell of camphor that filled the room. He put his arms around her, but gently, so that there was space between his forearms and her back, holding her as if she was to fragile to hug properly. Awkwardly, he patted her light, bushy aureole of dark brown hair, repeating: Good girl. Fine daughter.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #15

    First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you've done so wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn't a reason, and it isn't two people you're dealing with, just one. The same one every time.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #16

    He answered with a smile. The darkest and most malignant I had ever seen, too strong to be voluntary. The door, I thought. The door. But I didn't dare turn to it, in case it wasn't there.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #17

    He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #18

    I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #19

    I drew a chair up beside her and sang. All I do is dream of you the whole night through . . . It was a horrible rendition, and I quite enjoyed attempting it, setting the notes free from the song as each one went farther and farther astray.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #20

    I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    I think her favorite thing about our . . . collaboration was her actor and musician friends rubbing shoulders with my academic colleagues, she liked the atmosphere of challenge, the way anything that came under discussion could be claimed or rejected by either side. Time and time again the power of an idea or a piece of art was assessed by either its beauty or its technique or its usefulness, and time and time again my wife was surprised by how rarely anything on earth satisfies all three camps.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #23

    I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    I’m never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that’s almost as good as being there yourself. You’re in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the further away your friends, and the more spread out they are the better your chances of going safely through the world…

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #26

    Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #27

    In Egypt, like everywhere, the land is made to fit the sky; but here it is more so. Here it is possible to say, “This is land, and point, and “This is sky, and point, but the eyes can’t discover the dividing line.

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #28

    In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?

  • Helen Oyeyemi Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    It was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it - more rolled it, really - onto another target. One minute you were covered in snow, then it sped off sideways, as if a brisk, invisible giant had taken pity and brushed you down.

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