Helen Oyeyemi Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Helen Oyeyemi quote about:
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“I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“I see all mythology as one tradition, a way of disseminating knowledge that must come to us in code so that we can live sanely with it, since some forms of knowledge are too dark, or too complex, to be plainly spoken. And so we have these weird (and also sometimes entertaining and surprising and heartening) tales that belong to all of us.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“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.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“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.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Please tell me a story about a girl who gets away." I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. "Gets away from what, though?" "From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn't really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off of the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like 'happy' and 'good' will never find her." "You don't want her to be happy and good?" "I'm not sure what's really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Magic is an exercise of a pattern of thought (sometimes represented by a gesture, ritual, or the calling of a true name) that results in manifestation/s. But these patterns of thought can have so much to do with whimsy that magic often is jokes.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“However awful the storm of my disappointment, it's a response that belongs to me. It's my heart, after all. My territory, my kingdom. And since I'm the only one with the authority to surrender it, I can also take it back.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Fairy tales, because they have a very clear structure, are easier to interfere with. Also they have this really weird logic: the kind of logic that you only really experience when youre not feeling very well, or as a child.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it’s no big deal that I’m not like Snow. I can be another thing; I’m meant to be another thing.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesnt go in the order we perceive it. There are... repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like to pick up on those moments.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. . .”
-- 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.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“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.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“I dont have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“I feel like an old lady; my hero is Miss Marple.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“I love taking things out of context and playing with them and chopping up rules.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs om a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I'm not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you're around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“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.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe's head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess - dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship. That is not what happened.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“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.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi -
“The girl was lighter without her heart. She danced barefoot on the hot roads, and her feet were not cut by the glass or stones that studded her way. She spoke to the dead whenever they visited her. She tried to be kind, but they realised that they no longer had anything in common with her, and she realised it, too. So they went their separate ways.”
-- Helen Oyeyemi
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