298 Quotes by 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 Ive decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.

The night passes slowly, as it must when your wish is that another’s won’t come true.

When I saw you for the first time, I thought you had a secret life.

So she quit working to make sense of things – we don’t realise it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance.

Whenever they were together they couldn’t let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that their were either forgotten or misremembered.

All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: “Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?

How will I know I’ve grown up? When I’ve started using words I didn’t really know the meaning of. I said I did that already and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn’t.

It’s true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story’s story – the way a story is received and interpreted and used – the audience plays a part in that too.

But then some people give off a strange sense of preoccupation, as if there is something in their lives so important to them that they have to keep it silent, and close. And to keep this thing close, they make sacrifices.