The Opposite House Quotes

“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, The Opposite House

“She isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now--even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs om a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I'm not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you're around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“How can you know me and want to die?”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“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, The Opposite House

“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, The Opposite House

“Aya overflows with ache, or power. When the accent is taken off it, ache describes, in English, bone-deep pain. But otherwise ache is blood…fleeing and returning…red momentum. Ache is, ache is is is, kin to fear—a frayed pause near the end of a thread where the cloth matters too much to fail. The kind of need that takes you across water on nothing but bare feet. Ache is energy, damage, it is constant, in Aya’s mind all the time. She was born that way—powerful, half mad, but quiet about it.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“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, The Opposite House

“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, The Opposite House

“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, The Opposite House

“My Papi loves salt so much he can eat it sprinkled over thinly sliced tomatoes; if he feels his blood pressure rushing he reaches for more salt in case it’s his last.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Sometimes a child with wise eyes is born. Then some people will call that child an old soul. That is enough to make God laugh. For instance there is Yemaya Saramagua, who lives in the somewherehouse.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“I think they must have recognized something in each other, some poorly concealed intensity that other people find nerve-racking.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Sometimes we cannot see or hear or breathe because of our fright that this is all our bodies will know. We're scared by the happy hollow discipline that lines our brains and stomachs if we manage to stop after one biscuit. We need some kind of answer.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Why can't we kill this panic, or do the other thing and make it mute?”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“But love gets in the way of her paper flowers, love keeps them secret from Papi. Chabella and Papi have ways of looking at each other, ways of touching that are full of stunned caution. They trip over each other constantly, marvel each time. When Mami sits down at the table, wiping her hands on her cooking skirt after she’s set dishes down before us, Papi takes her hand, strokes her fingers, says her name as if he’s asking it. Mami nods at him; her lips smile, her eyes smile. I grew up doubting that anyone would ever look at me in the same way. My doubt contains no great trauma; it’s casual, the way people doubt they can jump off a bridge and fly.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Mami answers and her voice is hoarse and thin, and i think fight me better than this.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“The Soul Selects Her Own Society (Chapter 12 title)”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“On a dais in a London church, the Virgin Mary sits suprised by a rough crest of candlelight. The discomforture isn't in her expression but in the fluid form her carving takes, the way peaceful eyes rest in sockets that threaten to release them. Either the wood is eccentrically soft, or this sculpture remains a tree, alert
(despite careful varnishing and a wide, warning ring of sacred space around it)
to a propensity to burn.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House

“Who's there?
Something old? Someone holy...?”
― Helen Oyeyemi, The Opposite House