Helen Oyeyemi

“He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind.”

“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 r...”

“While waiting for her to phone me at school I'd feel seconds bursting inside me and leaving clouds. That won't come again—it can't. I'll never have that with anyone else. I'll never even com...”

“I wanted to ask her if she meant to spend the night here as well, but I didn't want her to say yes. It could be that she was in some kind of mood and just wanted a nap and my question might...”

“Miranda waited, then said, 'But what will I do for a whole year?' Neither of them answered her. She supposed the answer was, Get better. The thought of a slow and measured crawl back to heal...”

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

“The situation improved once it occurred to them that they should also talk; as they came to understand each other they learned that what they'd been afraid of was running out of self. On the...”

“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 matter...”

“I don't despise 'Don Quixote,' but it is a book I don't... get. I'll have to come back it. Maybe there'll be a gateway story that opens it up for me; that happened for me with 'Paradise Lost...”

“Authors I've longed to write like - but realize I actually can't even begin to - include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser,...”

“I do love Shirley Jackson, but I don't deserve to be named in connection with her. I remember reading 'The Haunting of Hill House' and having goosebumps for hours. The way she builds narrati...”

“Sometimes I feel weird about time. Sometimes I feel that it doesn't go in the order we perceive it. There are... repetitions that maybe we decide not to notice because it is simpler. I like...”

“I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as we...”