Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

The water was so cold on her skin that it felt dry.”

The only way to try and interrogate or possibly persuade stories to reveal something about themselves is to make all these provocations and assaults on them, and try and unpack them and unpick their seams and see if they react.

Without further ado I give you my number one [anti-heroine]: Carabosse, the fairy who goes where she is not invited expressly in order to curse a princess whose life was all set up to be a bright and gracious path from birth to death.

“...a place can live in you without letting you know about it for the longest time.” Parasol Against the Axe (2024)

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.

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.

I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.

"Wuraola sounded like another person. Not her at all. Should she answer to this name, and by doing so steal the identity of someone who belonged here?” (Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 28)

I sometimes consider a story’s anti-heroine to be an embodied protest against the set of ideals the narrative upholds in the form of the perfect heroine.

Maybe she was not really like that. It's just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified.

“To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely

… there's a difference between having no one because you've chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.

I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.

Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.

"Who is this woman who has a Nigerian maiden name in a British passport, who stands here wearing denim shorts and a strappy yellow top, with a white man and a half-and-half child?" (Chapter 2, Page 12)