Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

I like to hear the marching of typewriter keys, the shudder of the space bar, the metallic ding at the end of a line. Those sounds are encouraging, sounds made by someone who is interested in you and in what you're saying, someone who understands exactly what you're getting at. "Hmm," the typewriter says. And "Mmmm. I-see-I-see-I-see." And sometimes it chuckles....

When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it 'til the end, and somewhere along the line there'll be weirdness.

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.

She told him that she had looked after him because of the white hairs on his forehead that grew into the shape of a star. Sometimes you see that someone is marked and you're helpless after that - you love.

His voice in my ear. It did interesting things to me. It curved my back and parted my lips. I felt lazy and feline, and he wasn't even in the room.

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

I have loved a fool who counted kisses, she thought.

Most nights she went with the moon, and when it was round she stayed in my biggest bedroom and wouldn't answer the thing that asked her to let it out (let you out from where? let me out from the small, the hot, the take me out of the fire i am ready i am hard like the stones you ate, bitter like those husks) the moonlight striped her, marked out places where the whispering thing would slip through and she would unfold.

She was much too thin. She was serene, like someone accustomed to sickness, someone who layed back to back with it in bed.

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

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

Sometimes I do what I say I'm going to do, but more often I don't. It's a failing. The least of my failings, and the only one I feel up to admitting at the moment.

And that was what all the expressions felt like— masks. I didn't believe them. They were too thorough, too nuanced; they were never at odds with his subject matter.

How will I know I've grown up? When I've started using words I didn't really know the meaning of. I said I did that already and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn't.

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 craze, Boy. It's flying in the face of nature.

what they'd been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love.

But then you're put back together again, in a wholly different order . . ." "And it hurts so much you don't know if the new order will work." "It'll heal. It has to hurt before it heals, don't you think?" He

cities are fueled by the listless agony of workers providing services to other workers who barely acknowledge those services.

I remembered something from a short story I'd read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.

You come without papers because you have been unable to prove that you are useful to anyone, and when you arrive they put you in prison and if you are unable to prove that you have suffered they send you back.

People underestimate the freckled.

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.

You feel you've seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.

There was such an interesting exchange rate in this woman's mind...whenever she remembered anyone giving her anything, they only gave a very little and kept the lion's share to themselves. But whenever she remembered giving anyone anything she gave a lot, so much it almost ruined her.