298 Quotes by Helen Oyeyemi

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.

To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill.

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

Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze.

Suryaz and Deme would each need a talisman, an object that smelt lovely, or that felt kind to the hand; such things are little suitcases to put sad feelings in so that they can go away by themselves.

My head got so heavy, it sank down into my chest. So say whatever it is you think you’ve got to say, St. John. That you’re not in love with me. That you need to be alone. Say it. I’m not going to like it, no, I won’t like it at all. But I’ll be all right.

Miranda nodded and her reflection nodded, so that was twice.

She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who’d just come from the future but didn’t want to brag about it.

She never was able to surrender a feeling without a review of its peaks and low points.