Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

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

The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten.

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

She ought to know that if you want to set yourself up as queen and have everything the way you want it and keep sisters apart then you're not going to have a big fan club. She ought to know that where there's a queen there's often a plot to overthrow her.

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.

I was the "feelings" child. Everything I did was a feeling, and it did not count. It is so difficult to talk about demons and gods and spirits without it seeming that you are mad, or sarcastic, or simple, or talking in pictures, or trying to confuse. Or trying to be interesting. It is difficult to talk about demons and make it understood that even if "spirit" is the best word available, it isn't the right word.

People underestimate the freckled.

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.

On a dais in a London church, the Virgin Mary sits suprised by a rough crest of candlelight. The discomforture isn't in her expression but in the fluid form her carving takes, the way peaceful eyes rest in sockets that threaten to release them. Either the wood is eccentrically soft, or this sculpture remains a tree, alert
(despite careful varnishing and a wide, warning ring of sacred space around it)
to a propensity to burn.

Do you think that maybe we're able to love someone best when that person doesn't know how we feel?

Disturbs me that there's a part of my heart or mind, or some spot where the two meet, a spot that isn't mine because I'm a wife. This part isn't really me at all, but a promise I made on a snowy day. A promise to stay and to be with Arturo and to be good to him, and when there's no other way, I have to go to that promise to find my feeling for my husband. We walk the finest of foolish, foolish lines. How can Webster still love Ted? How can anybody love anybody else for more than five minutes?

To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me ...

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

He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it.

I remembered something from a short story I'd read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.

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 ...

As nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. 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. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life as long as the place stayed standing.

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.

There are people who are drawn to secrets as ants are to jam. Fausta's one of them. She searches out all things unspoken and unseen-not to make them known, but to destroy them so that nobody knows they ever existed. That's what makes her heart beat faster, the destruction of invisible foundations. Why? Because she finds it funny.

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

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.

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

We're friendly toward strangers because of a general belief (I don't know where it comes from) that we're born strangers and that the memory of how that feels never really leaves us.

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.

Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty.

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.

I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I'd break something inside me.

Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father's legs gone, the woman's torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows.

I miss her. So much that sometimes I'm scared I'll bring her back.

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

A clean-shaven man with a vocal tone reminiscent of post-coital whispers, that was Matyas Füst. The way he sings "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" is no joke.

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

Her gingerbread keeps and keeps. It outlasts all daintier gifts. Flowers wilt and shed mottled petals, mold blooms greenish-white on chocolate truffles, and Harriet's gingerbread hunkers down in its tin, no more attractive than the day it arrived, but no more repellent either.

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

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.

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.

But then, maybe "I don't believe in you" is the cruelest way to kill a monster.

Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.

Please tell a story about a girl who gets away."
I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. "Gets away from what, though?"
"From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn't really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like 'happy' and 'good' will never find her."
"You don't want her to be happy and good?"
"I'm not sure what's really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.

The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.

I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you're saying, someone who understands exactly what you're getting at. "Hmm," the typewriter says. And "Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see." And sometimes it chuckles ...

I can recommend wearing blue mascara whilst writing. I'm telling you, it really adds something.

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.

She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I'm not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.

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

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.

His puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you'd understand what I meant by that. Sometimes his puppets won't perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they'd decide to keep their mouths shut forever.

I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I'm the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read - I tell you where you are. Don't turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don't look.

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.

Easy to see the solution when you're not in the story, isn't it.

If you're about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something vicious beforehand.

I have a theory," she said. I nodded at her to continue and she said, "There's this fireplace downstairs. I think I went down there for some reason. To hide, maybe. I thought it was all my fault my mother died. And I hit my head on the marble. My brain bled. I died."

She watched me.

"Right," I said. "I don't think that's possible."

"Why don't you think it's possible?" she asked. "Because everyone can see me?"

"It's not that. It's just that it seems to me that the dead only return for love or for revenge. Who did you come back for?"

Neither of us smiled. I felt light-headed I couldn't believe that we were discussing this.

"Love or revenge," she sighed. "Neither."

"Miranda," I said, "You're not dead. Okay?"

"Ore," she said. "I'm not alive.

I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls.

How will I know I've grown up? When I've started using words I didn't really know the meaning of. I said I did that already and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn't.

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.

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

She doesn't want to see anyone. She's happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit.

Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn't used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I've got so many misgivings over this craze, Boy. It's flying in the face of nature.

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.

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

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.

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

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.

She was an ordinary librarian, innocent of any crime, but one day she fell into a giant paint box and has been on the run from the fashion police ever since ...

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.

Home is where your teapots are.

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.

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.

Pops says he loves me just the way I am, but not everyone in the world is like my father. Maman, for example. A difficult and dissatisfied woman. She made me learn flower arranging and how to walk properly
books on my head, the whole bit. These things ruined me for life. Now it sets my teeth on edge when I see flowers carelessly flung into a vase, and I'm forever looking at other women in the street and thinking, [I]Sloppy ... sloppy[/I]. And I know I shouldn't care, and I want to poke myself in the eye for caring, but I care anyway, so thanks for that, Maman.

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

I take aliens very seriously and don't appreciate light entertainment or weak approximations being made of them.

I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as well. And so, as I sort of been away from writing about identity, I still feel that kind of tug of roots and, you know, cultural background.

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

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.

Everyone would believe her because at the back of their minds, everyone thinks that twin brothers and sisters grow up magnetized towards each other, the prince at the foot of Rapunzel's tower before the tower is even built, the lover you can get at all the fucking time, the one who is you but a girl, or you but a boy, whose bed you know as well as your own. How could you endure that without falling in love? 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 that they can't remember when.

She was a daughter of the Virgin of Montserrat, and she felt instinctively and of course heretically that the Virgin herself was only a symbol of a yet greater sister-mother who was carefree and sorrowful all at once, a goddess who didn't guide you or shield you but only went with you from place to place and added her tangible presence to your own when required.

His dear face - his thrice-broken nose, his summer eyes.

Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence.

And all the while there was the theater of my hands. It was theater, in that it was the performance of something that was true, and as such, I believed in it with all my heart but was also able to come to the end of it at a moment's notice.

To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely
To you who sleep a lot because you are bored
To you who cry a lot because you are sad
I write this down.
Chew on your feelings that are cornered
Like you would chew on rice.
Anyway life is something that you need to digest.
- Chunyang Hee
("sorry" doesn't sweeten her tea)

Lucy happily settled down to work. First she sent for papyrus and handmade a book leaf by leaf, binding the leaves together between board covers. Then she filled each page from memory, drew English roses budding and Chinese roses in full bloom, peppercorn-pink Bourbon roses climbing walls and silvery musk roses drowsing in flowerbeds. She took every rose she'd ever seen, made them as lifelike as she could (where she shaded each petal the rough paper turned silken), and in these lasting forms she offered them to Safiye.

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.

I often think it would be such a luxury to go mad, and not have to worry about anything. [ ... ] There would be some sort of doctor there to tell me: "Don't worry, Mary, it's just that you're mad. Now be quiet and take this pill." And I would think, So that's all is is, and I would be glad. But aloud I would say, "What? I'm perfectly sane! You're mad ... " Only mildly, though; just for show, really.

We risk becoming so commonplace to the men we've thrown our lots in with who can't see us anymore, and who pat the sofa when they mean to pat our knee.

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

She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now
even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough.

But the shrieking went on and on, primal, almost glad - this protest was righteous. I couldn't make up my mind whether the baby was male or female; the only certainties were near baldness and incandescent rage. The kid didn't like its blanket, or its rattle, or the lap it was sat on, or the world . . . the time had come to demand quality.

People don't make too much money around here, but what comes with that is a different definition of what it means to be well-off. You're chairman of the board if you need twelve dollars a week and you make twelve dollars a week. If you've also got someone within ten minutes' walk who can make you laugh and someone else within a five-minute walk who can help you mourn, you're a millionaire. If on top of all that you've got a buddy or three who'll feed you delicious things and paint you pictures and dance with you, and another friend who'll watch your kids so you can go out dancing ... that's the billionaire lifestyle.

Her gamblder was in hospital. There'd been heavy losses at the blackjack table, his wife had discovered what he'd been up to, developed a wholly unexpected strength ("inhuman strength," he called it) broken both of his arms, and then moved in with a carpenter who'd clearly been keeping her company while he'd been out working on their finances.

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.

Not some sham family, politely avoiding having to care about one another, but people who would share a surname and the task of weaving a collective meaning into that name. People would support and protect and staunchly cherish one another.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one.

A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It's where we live. So

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.

I sometimes get asked: 'How come the men in your stories don't have such strong characters?' And I'm like: 'I don't care.' I just want to find out about all the different lives a woman can live. But my feminism has never been against men. It's not erasure; it's just they're not the focus. In real life, they're quite nice.

The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Chapter 12 title)

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.

All that happens when you grow up is that your ethics get completely compromised and you do extremely dodgy things you never imagined doing, apparently for the sake of others. Plus, growing up isn't in my job description.

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.

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