298 Quotes by Helen Oyeyemi

Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father’s legs gone, the woman’s torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows.

As nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Lucy understood the mountain’s wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life as long as the place stayed standing.

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.

White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.

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

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

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

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.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one.