Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

Harriet read more voraciously than Simon and Margot ever had. They discouraged this; she'd be so bored once she ran out of texts that were new to her. She surprised them with the discovery that once an avid reader runs out of books, she reads people. Harriet read everybody she met, and when she met them again, she reread them.

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?

Why can't we kill this panic, or do the other thing and make it mute?

It seemed wrong not to take a chance to meet people.

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.

She thought it something of a mercy for the gullible to die young, as being too often mistaken breaks the spirit.

Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We're scared by the happy hollow discipline that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer.

I think they must have recognized something in each other, some poorly concealed intensity that other people find nerve-racking.

How dare people sleep, how dare they lie so blankly in the dark?

He was really kind of magnificent. Sometimes he'd get punched or interrupted or outshouted while he was saying his sentence. And, well, he'd just wait until the interruption was over. Then, rather than starting his sentence again, he just went on as if nothing had happened, picking up from the precise syllable where he had been forced to stop. It drove people nuts.

She has a soft spot for houses that look sensible until you get inside.

And she told Monste all about it as she poured coffee into vases for them both. (It was true! It was true!)

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.

He was talented, at an age when other boys were horrible kissers, just horrible and sloppy. I was fourteen then, and he was sixteen.

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.

If you've...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.

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

You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need.

Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies.

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

What would I do in such a place? Die, I expect.

My Papi loves salt so much he can eat it sprinkled over thinly sliced tomatoes; if he feels his blood pressure rushing he reaches for more salt in case it's his last.

It's hard to find a woman without tactics. That'll be why I made one up.

She'd left me her husband, who didn't expect much from me. He'd had his great love. And now he was willing, determined even, to be amused, to belly laugh at the slightest provocation, to appreciate heart-shaped pieces of toast as tokens of my affection.