Top 150 Helen Oyeyemi Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There were days when he touched the tip of her nose and it was enough, a miracle of plenty.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

52. “He kissed me like ice cream, like a jazz waltz, the rough, gentle way the sea washed sand off my skin on the hottest day of the year.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

53. “Didn’t she know that knowing why doesn’t make things any less scary?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

54. “She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

55. “A song called ‘Earth Angel’ played in her head all morning – also three trumpets and a piano.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

56. “Honoring delicacy over full disclosure only comes back to haunt you in the end.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

57. “It was one of those ones they call screwball comedies, where people mislead and ill-treat each other in the most shocking and baffling way possible, then forgive and forget about it because they happen to like the look of each other. Only they call it falling in love.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

58. “With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there – not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

59. “His voice in my ear. It did interesting things to me. It curved my back and parted my lips. I felt lazy and feline, and he wasn’t even in the room.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

60. “Later in the morning Miranda opened her wardrobe and found it full of clammy ghosts that hovered around her body when she put them on. The cold trickled down in the gaps between the material and her chest. Scarecrow girl. She felt proud and nauseous, chosen and moulded by hands that froze.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

61. “I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I’ve lived too long. I’m twenty-two.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

62. “As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn’t decide if she was a monster.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

63. “It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this – it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

64. “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

65. “There are people who are drawn to secrets as ants are to jam. Fausta’s one of them. She searches out all things unspoken and unseen-not to make them known, but to destroy them so that nobody knows they ever existed. That’s what makes her heart beat faster, the destruction of invisible foundations. Why? Because she finds it funny.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

66. “School is one long illness with symptoms that switch every five minutes so you think it’s getting better or worse. But really it’s the same thing for years and years.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

67. “According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

68. “In Egypt, like everywhere, the land is made to fit the sky; but here it is more so. Here it is possible to say, “This is land,” and point, and “This is sky,” and point, but the eyes can’t discover the dividing line.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

69. “As nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Lucy understood the mountain’s wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life as long as the place stayed standing.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

70. “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

71. “I’m not saying I’m amazing or anything, but I’m decent-looking. Why shouldn’t a decent-looking girl expect to be kissed?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

72. “And no matter how many times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the pills were better than holding the child’s hand.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

73. “Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

74. “Do you think that maybe we’re able to love someone best when that person doesn’t know how we feel?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

75. “She doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

76. “So many times I’ve encountered people who are just kind of like, ‘Yeah, Nigeria,’ and, you know, thump their chest and seem very sure of, like, being Nigerian. And I’m just kind of, like, I wish I could be that sure.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

77. “Glad you like it- I don’t know what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

78. “White-flowered shrubs thickened around her and so did sleep; it directed her limbs. Lie down now, sleep said sweetly. Lie down. These are the secret hours of the day, the time that owls and bats take to themselves. The stars change places now; let them. You lie down.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

79. “The question is, were they born in love with each other, these twins, or did it blossom? At any rate it’s already happened, the onlookers agree. It must have. Ask them when they fell. The brother and sister say no, no, it’s nothing like that, but what they mean is they can’t remember when.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

80. “I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

81. “She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I’m not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

82. “I think, basically, what I’m good for is reading – a lot.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

83. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

84. “Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

85. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

86. “If I was afraid that something bad would happen, why wait? Why not make it happen now?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

87. “My mother exaggerates as often as she can. I’m sure she would like nothing more than to be part of a Greek tragedy. She wouldn’t even want a large part, she’d be perfectly content with a chorus role, warning that fate is coming to make havoc of all things.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

88. “Lily was a bunch of crumpled pockets and Sylvie is a black dress, perfumed scarves, iron posture and whatever else turns a person into an atmosphere.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

89. “She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

90. “Handmade and heartfelt; Harriet wanted everything she did to be like this.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

91. “The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven’t got an attitude problem.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

92. “I was the “feelings” child. Everything I did was a feeling, and it did not count. It is so difficult to talk about demons and gods and spirits without it seeming that you are mad, or sarcastic, or simple, or talking in pictures, or trying to confuse. Or trying to be interesting. It is difficult to talk about demons and make it understood that even if “spirit” is the best word available, it isn’t the right word.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

93. “There was such an interesting exchange rate in this woman’s mind... whenever she remembered anyone giving her anything, they only gave a very little and kept the lion’s share to themselves. But whenever she remembered giving anyone anything she gave a lot, so much it almost ruined her.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

94. “His puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you’d understand what I meant by that. Sometimes his puppets won’t perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they’d decide to keep their mouths shut forever.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

95. “She retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

96. “This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

97. “A house of stone and glass and iron should be stark and sober, a watchtower from which a benevolent guard is kept on society. But the white stone of this particular house rippled as if reacting to a hand that had found its most pleasurable contact. A notable newspaper critic had described this effect as being that of “a pernicious sensuality.” And if that wasn’t enough, the entire construction blushed a truly disgraceful peachy-pink at sunset and dawn.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

98. “I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found all on my own – on my own, not through you.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

99. “I’ve come to think that there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

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

— Helen Oyeyemi