The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Helen Oyeyemi

Dickinson is my hero because she was a joker, because she would never explain, because as a poet she confronted pain, dread and death, and because she was capable of speaking of those matters with both levity and seriousness. She’s my hero because she was a metaphysical adventurer.

Hero, Pain, She

I tend to prioritize emotional realism above the known laws of time and space, and when you do that, it’s inevitable that strange things happen. Which can be quite enjoyable, I think.

Time, Strange, Think

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

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 crazy, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature. A mushroom is a woodland fungus and a prawn comes from the sea. People have got no business stuffing one inside the other.

food, mushroom, new-fangled

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.

crush, love, lovers, man, woman

She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.

anger, calm, destruction, scribbles, writing

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

What do you want, Mary Foxe? My husband?” “I believe in him,” she said slowly. I wondered if she’d ever told him that, and if so, what he had to say about it. Someone you made up turns around and tells you they believe in you— what response could you possibly make? The scenario is just plain weird. And really kind of impertinent on her part, too. If it happened to me I think I’d be speechless for the rest of my life.

believe, made-up

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.

healing, make-believe, pretend

But also . . . I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with.

Mostly, when Jess didn’t want to talk about her ideas in class, Colleen thought that Jess was showing off, making sure that she would be coaxed and pleaded with, but how could Jess have explained in a coherent way that she was scared? 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.

butterflies, dark, thoughts

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.

fairy-tales-for-adults, love, movies