Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

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

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

She found Safiye leaning against an oil lantern out in the garden and saw for herself that she wasn't the only foolish woman in the world, or even at that party, for Safiye had Lucy's highly polished bangle in her hand and was turning it this way and that in order to catch fireflies in the billowing, transparent left sleeve of her gown.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

So she quit working to make sense of things— we don’t realise it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

[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

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

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

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.

~ 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

Mostly, when Jess didn't want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? 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

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

~ Helen Oyeyemi

This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn't need it.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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 crazy, Boy. It's flying in the face of nature. A mushroom is a woodland fungus and a prawn comes from the sea. People have got no business stuffing one inside the other.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

~ 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

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 their were either forgotten or misremembered.

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~ Helen Oyeyemi

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

… 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

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 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