Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

The night passes slowly, as it must when your wish is that another's won't come true.

Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it's what they want to see. I don't.

Her gingerbread keeps and keeps. It outlasts all daintier gifts. Flowers wilt and shed mottled petals, mold blooms greenish-white on chocolate truffles, and Harriet's gingerbread hunkers down in its tin, no more attractive than the day it arrived, but no more repellent either.

I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I'm the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read—I tell you where you are. Don't turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don't look.

Consent is a downward motion, I think - a leap or a fall - and whether they'll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own

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

He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.

The water is very green and has a sweet taste, both boys wrote in their diaries, at different times.

Be bad. Be wicked. And you should worry. But don't.

In a psychomantium glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind.

i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT'S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i]

Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.

I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I'd break something inside me.

I drew a chair up beside her and sang. All I do is dream of you the whole night through . . . It was a horrible rendition, and I quite enjoyed attempting it, setting the notes free from the song as each one went farther and farther astray.

I looked inside my typewriter. There's a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.

She was a daughter of the Virgin of Montserrat, and she felt instinctively and of course heretically that the Virgin herself was only a symbol of a yet greater sister-mother who was carefree and sorrowful all at once, a goddess who didn't guide you or shield you but only went with you from place to place and added her tangible presence to your own when required.

He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it.

She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I'm not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.

Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today." Presence

A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It's where we live." So

How can you know me and want to die?

If I was afraid that something bad would happen, why wait? Why not make it happen now?

I'd have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place.

I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I've lived too long. I'm twenty-two.