298 Quotes by Helen Oyeyemi

I examined the portraits nearest to me but couldn’t get past the sensation that here was the same man over and over, crouched in old boxes, readying himself to spit on my plate.

She doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit.

And no matter how many times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the pills were better than holding the child’s hand.

In a psychomantium glass topples darkness. Things appear as they really are, people appear as they really are. Visions are called from a point inside the mirror, from a point inside the mind.

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.

Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end.

I think, basically, what I’m good for is reading – a lot.

I’ve come to think that there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.

Because he says he can’t stand you and you act like you can’t stand him, and whenever a man and a woman behave like that toward each other, it usually means something’s going on.