Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

Home is where your teapots are.

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.

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

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.

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

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot.

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.

There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.

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

I dont have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

That's the ideal meeting...once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.

You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.

If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.

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

Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it’s no big deal that I’m not like Snow. I can be another thing; I’m meant to be another thing.

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

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.

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.

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

She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.

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

With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.

[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]

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.

Jess couldn't stop spitting out words, because they were words like blades to hurt, and if she swallowed them, she'd be scraped hollow.

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

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.

She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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