Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

As it is he hears voices without form; they sing and sing, as they have from the beginning and will continue until the end. Chad borrows their melodies: That's the music part of the songs he wrotes.For words Ched uses rhymes from our village, the kind that nobody pays attention to anymore because they advocate living by a code that will surely make you one of life's losers.

her body held in frightened rigidity because if she dared stop clapping then a bad thing would come.

and she felt sorry for the old black Singer sewing machine, which seemed never to have had any fun.

A song called 'Earth Angel' played in her head all morning—also three trumpets and a piano.

What I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can't pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen.

Love is like a magic carpet with a mind of its own. You step on that carpet and it takes you places–marvelous places, odd places, terrifying places, places you'd never have been able to reach on foot. Yeah, love's a real adventure! But you go where the carpet goes; after you've stepped onto it you don't get to choose a goddamned thing.

Do you want this ice cream?" he asked her, whisking the dish all around the tabletop. "I mean, do you truly want it? Would you fight for this ice cream? Would you bear a deep wound in order to possess this ice cream completely? How deep a wound? What if it was as deep as the grave? What does this ice cream really mean to you, Miss Cabrini?

All around them people were speaking a language Brown didn't understand; it was like silence with sharp edges in it.

Didn't she know that knowing why doesn't make things any less scary?

She didn't look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn't what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily's studio.

Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn't read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them.

We're friendly toward strangers because of a general belief (I don't know where it comes from) that we're born strangers and that the memory of how that feels never really leaves us.

Maybe she was not really like that. It's just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified.

Miranda nodded and her reflection nodded, so that was twice

His eyes were very bright; they'd been like that since he'd begun talking about his subject. He looked like someone in love. Well, in love the way people were in old movies.

That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all it's own.

I miss her. So much that sometimes I'm scared I'll bring her back.

With growing disbelief, Jess yet again felt herself slipping into the gap - that gap of perception between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening.

Easy to see the solution when you're not in the story, isn't it.

Bisi, how could you, now? You know that when you pray, you are heard, if not by God, then by yourself. When you pray, you tell yourself what you truly want, what you really need. And once you know these things, you can do nothing but go after them. Sae you understand?

She had a new bracelet on, stacked with emeralds brighter than her eyes. I hate rich people.

She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable.

I'm not lying to you," she said, shaking her head. "I really can't do it." "You can and you must," they snapped. "Those stories belong to us. It doesn't matter what language they're in, or what they're about; they belong to us. And we gave them to you without looking at them first. So now it's time to see what we've done.

According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well.