298 Quotes by Helen Oyeyemi

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

Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it’s what they want to see. I don’t.

She didn’t look into the mirror itself. She was becoming someone, it seemed. She had read somewhere that you only became a woman once your mother had died. But that wasn’t what worried her. She worried about becoming as perfect as the person shown to her on paper in Lily’s studio.

She is a double danger – there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?

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.

When the hysteric saw what the suffragists had done – the way that en masse they’d turned starvation onto its side – she must have been suprised. Her shock must have brought her close to speech.

If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one. But of course if you take that path you may also find that in the end you’re unloved.

More than friends, eh? More than friends... You know, my mother once told me that half of the hatred that springs up between people is rooted in this mistaken belief that there’s any human relationship more sacred than friendship.

His heavy eyebrows lowered and he made some small, involuntary gesture with his hand that was recognisably superstitious, as if the words ‘God forbid’ had flowed into his body.