Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

Sure, I've occasionally told Louis Chen that I hope a monster eats him, and he's told me to go boil my head a few times, but that tends to be in the heat of the moment, and anyway we're getting married once we get old enough, so we don't have to make nice all of the time.

He held me so tightly that numbness stretched all the way down my arms and only let go a few minutes after he did. It wasn't as nice a feeling as the flag around my shoulders. But I felt more certain of it because it lasted longer.

He described the three riots he had witnessed firsthand, in three different cities. He made the anger of the poor and put-upon sound like a storm on the ground; it scorched buildings when it woke, its first touch killed.

I was always weak in the head—that must be it. I can't seem to care anymore about what I'm supposed to do.

I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.

This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.

I don't feel there's a difference between the real world and the fairy-tale world. They contain psychological truths and, I guess, projections of what the culture that tells them thinks about various things: men, women, aging, dying - the most basic aspects of being human.