Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

She thought I hadn't seen her, but she's no good at hiding her intentions. She can't help tiptoeing around with a finger to her lips at key moments.

There was a brass water pitcher set up in the center of the table, and a couple of times I found myself smiling at my reflection in the side of it, but stopped just before anyone caught me. The smile was a chinchilla fur kind of smile. Look what I got you, it seemed to say. And I can get you more.

Listen, there's this little girl who makes herself laugh. You hear her from the other room, and when you try to get her to explain, she just says: 'Don't worry about it.' And maybe it's the thief in me, but I think this girl is mine, and that when she and I are around each other, we're giving each other something we've never had, or taking back something we've lost.

But in an unfamiliar house, when you're uncertain where you're going, every movement is prolonged by the sense that you're going to try the wrong door or get in someone's way and bother someone.

She knows her place, she sure does know her place. There's something ghostlike about this girl . . .

when I heard whispering. It was as soft as snowfall, but it took over all my hearing.

What nobody knew about the docile girl from Osogbo was that her heart was too heavy, and that almost from birth she had felt its weight, a gravitational pull that invited her to her grave. 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.

times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.

To be precise, she doesn't like the way her smile photographs as forced. So smiling's out. But she doesn't think she can sustain a sober look without seeming unfriendly, so she frequently switches between two expressions—one she thinks of as Alert and the other she thinks of as Accommodating, though she's the only one who can tell the difference.

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.

Family lore has it that they entertained each other very well, the pragmatist and the man who was almost too gullible to live. One had more patience, and the other had more resolve, and they were about even when it came to daring, so their love established possibilities and impossibilities without keeping score.

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 about people until they love my remoteness. I'm not just talking about romances but about friendships too. Whoa, Mia, you're too intense. I get a lot of that. So I know that I won't be loved the way I need to be.

The only thing that disturbs us here in the village is the foreign soldiers. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, patrolling. They fight us and they try to tell us, in our own language, that they're freeing us.

Half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in their mistaken belief there is any human relationship more sacred than friendship..

We risk becoming so commonplace to the men we've thrown our lots in with who can't see us anymore, and who pat the sofa when they mean to pat our knee.

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?

Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn't real.

Lily was a bunch of crumpled pockets and Sylvie is a black dress, perfumed scarves, iron posture and whatever else turns a person into an atmosphere.

Mary. If you were real I'd run away with you forever.

It is a veiling of alternatives, a way of making sure you don't reject the choice Mother's made for you. No matter what, you will not starve. She has a hunch that over the years, usage of this recipe has always fallen on the shadow side of things.

Every member of this class is under the impression that they are thick, and every single one of them is the opposite. Passing the GCSE now probably won't improve their job prospects or raise their estimation in the eyes of their family and friends.

The girl tried, several times, to give her love away, but her love would not stay with the person she gave it to and snuck back to her heart without a sound.

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

More than friends, eh? More than friends . . . You know, my mother once told me that half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in this mistaken belief that there's any human relationship more sacred than friendship.