Oyeyemi Helen Quotes & Sayings

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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) — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

what they'd been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love. — Helen Oyeyemi

There were days when she'd open her eyes and be him for six hours in a row; she knew all his secrets and nothing he had done seemed wrong to her, she knew how it was, how things had been, she was there. There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.
But who finds happiness interesting? — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

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

As it is he hears voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end. Chad borrows their melodies: That's the music part of the songs he wrotes.For words Ched uses rhymes from our village, the kind that nobody pays attention to anymore because they advocate living by a code that will surely make you one of life's losers. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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? — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

No, this is pretty much the same version I read," I said, because it felt too damn late to back down. I imagine that from time to time some similar situation has led governments to declare war." pg.57 — Helen Oyeyemi

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

For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they're around mirrors. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn't feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this - it didn't matter. I don't have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

Can't believe you're making me say this am willing to fill any role required by you i.e. buddy best buddy laborer unpaid driver unpaid gardener unpaid father of your children coat etc just tell me which and how we'll manage come home will square things with your Pa - Charlie — Helen Oyeyemi

Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn't answer the thing that asked her to let it out
(let you out from where?
let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks)
the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. He — Helen Oyeyemi

People underestimate the freckled. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

The way that people feel changes everything. Feelings are forces. They cause us to time travel. And to leave ourselves, to leave our bodies. I would be that kind of psychologist who says, 'You're absolutely right - there are monsters under the bed.' — Helen Oyeyemi

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

When I saw you for the first time, I thought you had a secret life. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it 'til the end, and somewhere along the line there'll be weirdness. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

Magic is an exercise of a pattern of thought (sometimes represented by a gesture, ritual, or the calling of a true name) that results in manifestation/s. But these patterns of thought can have so much to do with whimsy that magic often is jokes. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

I had never seen her wearing lipstick, but knew better than to say so in case she did that mysterious alchemy some girls do and transformed the comment into my accusing her of having gained weight. — Helen Oyeyemi

The book itself was useless, too. All the advice it offered about the timing of meals and affecting a cheerful disposition and trying to take an interest in the husband's doings even when they're fearfully boring and never saying 'I told you so'
those aren't the reasons a person looks with favour upon another person, these aren't the reasons someone stays in love. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

A few people have tried to make me see that my writing isn't quite their thing by saying to me: 'What about realism?' To which my general response is, 'What about it?' However, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson, was to say something similar if asked 'What about the fantastic?' — Helen Oyeyemi

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

Their brothers are their heroes, and if anything happens to William Saunders or Robert Young, Kenneth and Larry might blame everyone around them, because we're the citizens those men will have died for, and maybe they won't believe we were worth it. Are we? Have we ever been worth it, any of the times before? — Helen Oyeyemi

I have loved a fool who counted kisses, she thought. — Helen Oyeyemi

Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today." Presence — Helen Oyeyemi

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. In Louis Chen's case, he sometimes says my name as if it were a lesser-known word for bacon. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

[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

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

Bisi, how could you, now? You know that when you pray, you are heard, if not by God, then by yourself. When you pray, you tell yourself what you truly want, what you really need. And once you know these things, you can do nothing but go after them. Sae you understand? — Helen Oyeyemi

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 ... — Helen Oyeyemi

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

I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

I'm greedy about cities - I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little later, when I find myself returning to those places to say hello again, even if only in memory. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

I don't think my writing has much to do with my age. For me, my biography is more about what I was reading at what age. It's more of an intellectual thing of wanting to be free to write and think without being too bound by categorisation. I don't think I'm made for these times; I feel more like an old-fashioned writer. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

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

The wooden devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn't even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered. — Helen Oyeyemi

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

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. — Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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