Helen Oyeyemi quotes

Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line. (Helen Oyeyemi)

I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

Helen Oyeyemi

You don't return people's smiles-it's perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.

Helen Oyeyemi

Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own.

Helen Oyeyemi

If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.

Helen Oyeyemi

It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn't feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this-it didn't matter. I don't have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.

Helen Oyeyemi

The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it's ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.

Helen Oyeyemi

Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when you're not feeling very well, or as a child.

Helen Oyeyemi

I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.

Helen Oyeyemi

I dont have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

Helen Oyeyemi

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

I feel like an old lady; my hero is Miss Marple.

Helen Oyeyemi

I love taking things out of context and playing with them and chopping up rules.

Helen Oyeyemi

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She's my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.

Helen Oyeyemi

It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.

Helen Oyeyemi

... there's a difference between having no one because you've chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.

Helen Oyeyemi

For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they're around mirrors.

Helen Oyeyemi

She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.

Helen Oyeyemi

I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now I've decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.

Helen Oyeyemi

The way 'The Icarus Girl' came about was by me just basically bragging it with a literary agent and telling him I'd written 150 pages when I'd only written 20. And I think it was when the agent e-mailed me back right the very next day after sending him the 20 pages and asking to see the other 130.

Helen Oyeyemi

I love character and voice, and my favourite books have been the ones in which I've become completely absorbed. (Helen Oyeyemi)

The way that people feel changes everything. Feelings are forces. They cause us to time travel. And to leave ourselves, to leave our bodies. I would be that kind of psychologist who says, 'You're absolutely right - there are monsters under the bed.'

Helen Oyeyemi

Home is where your teapots are.

Helen Oyeyemi

So many times I've encountered people who are just kind of like, 'Yeah, Nigeria,' and, you know, thump their chest and seem very sure of, like, being Nigerian. And I'm just kind of, like, I wish I could be that sure.

Helen Oyeyemi

Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesnt go in the order we perceive it. There are... repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.

Helen Oyeyemi