Top 150 Helen Oyeyemi Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

102. “Consent is a downward motion, I think – a leap or a fall – and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

103. “She never was able to surrender a feeling without a review of its peaks and low points.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

104. “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked. My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery. Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year it is and why he was even born .”

— Helen Oyeyemi

105. “I remember Mum repeatedly telling us we had good hearts and good brains. When she said that we’d say ‘thanks’ and it might have sounded as if we were thanking her for seeing us that way but actually we were thanking her for giving us whatever goodness was in us.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

106. “But Jess was sliding breathlessly down into the waiting sky, so she couldn’t find the words to tell TillyTilly that sisters was something about being held without hands, and the skin-flinch of seeing and simultaneously being seen.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

107. “Miranda nodded and her reflection nodded, so that was twice.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

108. “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

109. “A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.” So.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

110. “If you’re about to fall to the ground like a frail creature in need of smelling salts, you owe it to yourself to at least say something vicious beforehand.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

111. “He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

112. “His eyes were very bright; they’d been like that since he’d begun talking about his subject. He looked like someone in love. Well, in love the way people were in old movies.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

113. “Not some sham family, politely avoiding having to care about one another, but people who would share a surname and the task of weaving a collective meaning into that name. People would support and protect and staunchly cherish one another.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

114. “What I mean to say is that a whole lot of technically impossible things are always trying to happen to us, appear to us, talk to us, show us pictures, or just say hi, and you can’t pay attention to all of it, so I just pick the nearest technically impossible thing and I let it happen.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

115. “Miranda put a hand over her face and looked through her fingers, the world in pieces, her father’s legs gone, the woman’s torso vanished. Now they looked like broken dolls, their jaws clacking, breeze blowing through their hollows.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

116. “My head got so heavy, it sank down into my chest. So say whatever it is you think you’ve got to say, St. John. That you’re not in love with me. That you need to be alone. Say it. I’m not going to like it, no, I won’t like it at all. But I’ll be all right.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

117. “And other times – too often, maybe – I don’t dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

118. “When the hysteric saw what the suffragists had done – the way that en masse they’d turned starvation onto its side – she must have been suprised. Her shock must have brought her close to speech.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

119. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

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

— Helen Oyeyemi

121. “I’d have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

122. “Miss Foxe occasionally wondered if she spent her life approaching invisibility and had finally arrived at it.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

123. “It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick – she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up. She was the ugly girl at the ball.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

124. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

125. “Easy to see the solution when you’re not in the story, isn’t it.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

126. “She was a daughter of the Virgin of Montserrat, and she felt instinctively and of course heretically that the Virgin herself was only a symbol of a yet greater sister-mother who was carefree and sorrowful all at once, a goddess who didn’t guide you or shield you but only went with you from place to place and added her tangible presence to your own when required.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

127. “She is a double danger – there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

128. “I looked inside my typewriter. There’s a city in there. Black and grey columns and no inhabitants.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

129. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

130. “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?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

131. “The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

132. “Suryaz and Deme would each need a talisman, an object that smelt lovely, or that felt kind to the hand; such things are little suitcases to put sad feelings in so that they can go away by themselves.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

133. “Young men... learn practical skills that set is in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women: Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotance.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

134. “Her heart’s breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

135. “Looking at those last photos was like flipping through a book of silence.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

136. “She won’t forget or recover, she is inconsolable.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

137. “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.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

138. “That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all it’s own.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

139. “She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

140. “Funny to do something and then realise the reason for it afterwards.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

141. “A rustle handle turning, or a wooden door forced open until its hinges buckle, or to me, to me it was the sound of something growing. I sometimes imagine that if we could hear trees growing we’d hear them... creak... like that.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

142. “Books. I am attracted and repelled; books are conversations that are not addressed to me and I want to sneak up and listen but I also want to be invited in. If I was invited in the conversation would not be what it was.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

143. “When he’s a bachelor, life’s tough because he has everything he needs except Miss Right, and when he finds a sweetheart with the full package – beauty, brains, sweet temper – she’s too much, she’s smothering him.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

144. “When Jonas came to the phone I asked him if he remembered that we used to kiss. “I remember,” he said tersely. “Is that why you called?”

— Helen Oyeyemi

145. “He was drinking Harriet’s favourite, cold tea... not iced tea, but hot tea that had cooled. They liked him so much. They liked the way he talked when he talked and they liked his quiet when he was quiet.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

146. “So Harriet maintains her point, which is that joining isn’t a question of effort or overextension thereof. You miss your chance to join several generations before birth.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

147. “I’m sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

148. “She was not sure how to pronounce his name, not even in her head would the sound make any sense. She had to look away to stop herself from making up more stories about him.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

149. “We both know nothing’s all right, but when I tell you it will be, you take it. If you don’t, it’s because you’re holding out for another outcome altogether.”

— Helen Oyeyemi

150. “You tell me what it is when some sensation leaves you for the space of one heartbeat and returns at double strength.”

— Helen Oyeyemi