Top 150 Helen Oyeyemi Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “I love taking things out of context and playing with them and chopping up rules.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

4. “And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

5. “I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don’t have names.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

6. “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

7. “Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

8. “White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them. At a pinch, cream will do.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

9. “I feel like an old lady; my hero is Miss Marple.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

10. “Love is like a magic carpet with a mind of its own. You step on that carpet and it takes you places–marvelous places, odd places, terrifying places, places you’d never have been able to reach on foot. Yeah, love’s a real adventure! But you go where the carpet goes; after you’ve stepped onto it you don’t get to choose a goddamned thing.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

11. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Because things grow. Wherever there is air and light and open space, things grow.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

15. “I miss her. So much that sometimes I’m scared I’ll bring her back.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

16. “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

17. “She was only fifteen. At that age embarassment is something you can actually die of.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

18. “What’s the matter, Jess? Why are you sad?’ And she’d have to explain that she wasn’t sad, just tired, though how she could be so tired in the middle of the day with the sun shining and everything, she didn’t know. It made her feel ashamed.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

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

— Helen Oyeyemi

20. “But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruelest way to kill a monster.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

21. “It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

22. “Would that be dangerous, to not look while being looked at?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

23. “I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

24. “If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

25. “I am here, reading with you. I am reading this over your shoulder. I make your home home, I’m the Braille on your wallpaper that only your fingers can read – I tell you where you are. Don’t turn to look at me. I am only tangible when you don’t look.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

26. “In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

27. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

28. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

29. “Home is where your teapots are.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

30. “Be bad. Be wicked. And you should worry. But don’t.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

31. “All that happens when you grow up is that your ethics get completely compromised and you do extremely dodgy things you never imagined doing, apparently for the sake of others. Plus, growing up isn’t in my job description.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

32. “This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

33. “A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can’t stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

34. “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

35. “She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who’d just come from the future but didn’t want to brag about it.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

36. “Life has changed a lot, you know. You didn’t used to get all this food inside food inside food when I was a girl. The other day I was eating a mushroom and found it had been stuffed with prawns. I’ve got so many misgivings over this craze, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

37. “I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I’d break something inside me.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

38. “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

39. “She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gunpoint.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

40. “I remembered something from a short story I’d read, about how the girl you want is the girl you see once and then she is nowhere to be found. The girl who does not appear in the crowded room.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

41. “Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today.” Presence.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

42. “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

43. “If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

44. “The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

45. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

46. “People underestimate the freckled.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

47. “Her gingerbread keeps and keeps. It outlasts all daintier gifts. Flowers wilt and shed mottled petals, mold blooms greenish-white on chocolate truffles, and Harriet’s gingerbread hunkers down in its tin, no more attractive than the day it arrived, but no more repellent either.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

48. “To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

49. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

50. “I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with.”

— Helen Oyeyemi