Boy, Snow, Bird Quotes

“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven't got an attitude problem.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“... it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“I watched wealthy men and their wives and dates dancing and playing cards and making deals: I will admire you exactly as much, no more or less, as you admire me. I will love you in the strictest moderation.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“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, Boy, Snow, Bird

“Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. The poem tells me it’s no big deal that I’m not like Snow. I can be another thing; I’m meant to be another thing.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“She was only fifteen. At that age embarassment is something you can actually die of.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“She was poised and sympathetic, like a girl who'd just come from the future but didn't want to brag about it.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“First you try to find a reason, try to understand what you've done so wrong so you can be sure not to do it anymore. After that you look for signs of a Jekyll and Hyde situation, the good and the bad in a person sifted into separate compartments by some weird accident. Then, gradually, you realize that there isn't a reason, and it isn't two people you're dealing with, just one. The same one every time.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“If you wish to be truly free, you must love no one. But of course if you take that path you may also find that in the end you're unloved.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“The best line of work for me would be roadside sprite. I'd live quietly by a dust-covered track that people never came across unless they took a wrong turn, and I'd offer the baffled travelers lemonade and sandwiches, maybe even fix their engines if they asked nicely (I'd have used my solitude to read extensively on matters of car maintenance). Then the travelers would go on their way, relaxed and refreshed, and they'd forget they'd ever met me. That's the ideal meeting... once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“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, Boy, Snow, Bird

“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.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“But also . . . I have plenty of people around me to talk to, and no one to be honest with.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“I told her that magic spells only work until the person under the spell is really and honestly tired of it. It ends when continuing becomes simply too ghastly a prospect.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“When something catches your attention just keep your attention on it, stick with it ’til the end, and somewhere along the line there’ll be weirdness.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“She ought to know that if you want to set yourself up as queen and have everything the way you want it and keep sisters apart then you’re not going to have a big fan club. She ought to know that where there’s a queen there’s often a plot to overthrow her.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“People underestimate the freckled.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“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 craze, Boy. It’s flying in the face of nature.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“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, Boy, Snow, Bird

“Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it’s what they want to see. I don’t.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“You feel you’ve seen a hundred of me. You know how my tiny mind works. But maybe it goes both ways.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“I drew a chair up beside her and sang. All I do is dream of you the whole night through . . . It was a horrible rendition, and I quite enjoyed attempting it, setting the notes free from the song as each one went farther and farther astray.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It's better that Charlie and I didn't make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“We’re friendly toward strangers because of a general belief (I don’t know where it comes from) that we’re born strangers and that the memory of how that feels never really leaves us.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

“I can’t explain, maybe it isn’t something that needs explaining, how the sight of a broken cage just puts you up on stilts. The promise that the cage will always be empty, that its days as a jailhouse are done.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird