Quotes from Helen Oyeyemi

She was an ordinary librarian, innocent of any crime, but one day she fell into a giant paint box and has been on the run from the fashion police ever since...

His dear face - his thrice-broken nose, his summer eyes.

But Jess was sliding breathlessly down into the waiting sky, so she couldn't find the words to tell TillyTilly that sisters was something about being held without hands, and the skin-flinch of seeing and simultaneously being seen.

But the shrieking went on and on, primal, almost glad—this protest was righteous. I couldn't make up my mind whether the baby was male or female; the only certainties were near baldness and incandescent rage. The kid didn't like its blanket, or its rattle, or the lap it was sat on, or the world . . . the time had come to demand quality.

The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it's already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it's nothing like that, but what they mean is they can't remember when.

Oh, everyone's got a view, haven't they? .. Everyone's got something to say," she'd tell me. ..

I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls.

Were those exact words said: 'I no longer love you'?" "No." "No. Hardly anybody ever says it like that, do they? They simply become unkind.

All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: "Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?

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 above people until they love my remoteness.

Sometimes I say terrible things to him because I don't want him to know I'm sad; sometimes I fly off the handle to hide the fact that I don't know what I'm talking about. And other times--too often, maybe--I don't dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone.

In Egypt, like everywhere, the land is made to fit the sky; but here it is more so. Here it is possible to say, "This is land," and point, and "This is sky," and point, but the eyes can't discover the dividing line.

Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty.

Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence.

Her heart's breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off.

And other times—too often, maybe—I don't dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone.

Miss Foxe occasionally wondered if she spent her life approaching invisibility and had finally arrived at it.

If you're about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something vicious beforehand.

Glad you like it- I don't know what this song is called, but it's probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we've got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here.

His puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you'd understand what I meant by that. Sometimes his puppets won't perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they'd decide to keep their mouths shut forever.

A clean-shaven man with a vocal tone reminiscent of post-coital whispers, that was Matyas Füst. The way he sings "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" is no joke.

maybe she grew one more in the night and that's why the night sleep was so deep, it was a matching pair of sleeps. —

Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin's short stories for John Cheever's, Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière's I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka UgreÅ¡i?'s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder for Capote's In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle's The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James.

yellow made her so nervous that she suspected it was the cause of war.