Best 138 quotes of Helen Oyeyemi on MyQuotes

Now, St. John could have been born into his elegance. It's a dangerous kind of elegance—he doesn't raise his voice, he lowers it.

One or the other of us said 'I can't,' and if it was me I don't know why because I wanted to. Maybe I'm just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.

Our exchanges always seem to turn into whatever he wants them to.

Our favorite film is Vertigo. Amy Eleni and I must watch it seventeen or eighteen times a year, and with each viewing our raptness grows looser and looser; we don't need the visuals anymore--one or the other of us can go into the kitchen halfway through and call out the dialogue while making up two cups of Horlicks. From the minute you see empty, beautiful, blond Madeleine Elster, you know she is doomed because she exists in a way that Scottie, the male lead, just doesn't. You know that Madeleine is in big trouble, because she's a vast wound in a landscape where wounds aren't allowed to stay open--people have to shut up and heal up. She's in trouble because the film works to a plan that makes trauma speak itself out, speak itself to excess until it dies; this film at the peak of its slyness, when people sweat and lick their lips excessively and pound their chests and grab their hair and twist their heads from side to side, performing this unspeakable torment.

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.

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

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

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

She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was.

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

She is a double danger—there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?

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.

She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gunpoint.

She was only fifteen. At that age embarassment is something you can actually die of.

She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable.

Soy mala. Papá ya me ha avisado al respecto; sé el riesgo que corro cuando busco defectos en la gente en lugar de algo que apreciar. Es como tener arenilla en los ojos. Cada vez ves menos de la persona que tienes delante y más la arenilla de tu ojo. Ya lo capto.

That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all it's own.

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.

The night was very stark, alternate streams of town cars and chequered taxicabs, blaring horns busily staking claims—here is the road and here is the sidewalk. But the road looked so much livelier, what if I tried the road?

There are real books all around the house, everywhere. She could pick one up and in mere seconds she could be involved in something that makes her laugh and feel nervous and hot and cold and forgive the world its absurdity.

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

...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 (him) 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 anybody love anybody else for more than five minutes?

There's that difficulty with delirium too: You see it raging in another person's eyes and then it flickers out. That's the most dangerous moment; it's impossible to see something that's so swiftly and suddenly swallowed you whole.

There was . . . a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri's room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall.

The situation improved once it occurred to them that they should also talk; as they came to understand each other they learned that what they'd been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love

The water was so cold on her skin that it felt dry.

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

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.

Three creaks. She stepped three times. What is the meaning of it? Three creaks, three weeks? If she comes back for her shoes in three days, then I only need to empty them another three times. If it really is three weeks that were meant, what then. If three months, what then. Three years. That's why I had to write it down now. By then I may no longer believe I heard anything in Miri's room.

To be Druhástranian is to be dissatisfied with one’s condition until one can find some official personage to sign off on it. And if someone says that what you’re doing is all right today, won’t you need to get that approval reconfirmed later, get another stamp at some other desk a year from now? Of course this is a mind-set that a nation can be stunned into. All you need is a century or two of freedoms and strictures that appear and disappear between one year and the next, words and deeds that were frowned upon just yesterday receiving vehement acclaim today.

What do you think of Poe?" "He's awful. He was obviously . . . what's the term . . . 'disappointed in love' at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he'd probably punch me on the nose." "I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming.

What do you want, Mary Foxe? My husband?" “I believe in him," she said slowly. I wondered if she’d ever told him that, and if so, what he had to say about it. Someone you made up turns around and tells you they believe in you— what response could you possibly make? The scenario is just plain weird. And really kind of impertinent on her part, too. If it happened to me I think I’d be speechless for the rest of my life.

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.

When Jonas came to the phone I asked him if he remembered that we used to kiss. "I remember," he said tersely. "Is that why you called?

While waiting for her to phone me at school I'd feel seconds bursting inside me and leaving clouds. That won't come again—it can't. I'll never have that with anyone else. I'll never even come close.

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.

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.

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.