What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Quotes

“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, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Rowan told me about a girl who responded to all external stimuli except human touch. That, she did not feel at all, which was the reason why from an early age other people scared her and kept getting scarier and scarier until they became almost impossible to cope with. She could see and hear her fellow human beings but making physical contact was identical to grabbing thin air. It was like living with hallucinations that would neither disappear nor become tangible. The worst part was having to pretend that this pack of ghouls was nothing to be concerned about. She quickly learned that getting upset was counterproductive because there were attempts to comfort her with hugs and the like. She said whatever she had to say and did whatever she had to say and did whatever she had to do to circumvent unnecessary physical contact, but her situation was further complicated by the effect that her touch had on others. She was walking pain relief. She didn't cure or absorb the source of pain-it was more that she dismantled the sensation itself for a few hours, or up to half a day depending the duration of skin contact.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“His puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you'd understand what I meant by that. Sometimes his puppets won't perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they'd decide to keep their mouths shut forever.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Glad you like it- I don't know what this song is called, but it's probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we've got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Sometimes I dream I'm falling, and it's not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I'm sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think,well, at least I'm not falling anymore. Clearly I haven't arrived in your life a moment too soon. You looked at me, and this is how I saw you, when first I saw you: I saw your eyes like flint arrows, and your chin set against the world, and I saw the curve of your lips,which is so beautiful that it's almost illusory-your eyes freeze a person, but then the flickering flame of your mouth becons.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“How did it go from "Füst should apologize to the woman he beat up" to "Füst should apologize to his fiancée" to "Füst should apologize to us"?”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Has she read any of the comments? That's what I wondered. Did the woman from YouTube video understand that the public wasn't on her side? She made her requests with such placid mirth, as if talking into a seashell or a shattered phone, as if Matyas Füst fans weren't actively looking for her, probably in order to finish her off. Even those who'd begun to condemn Füst believed his apologies should be directed elsewhere ("It'd his fincée I feel sorry for in all of this..."). Those who claimed they wanted to feel concern for Youtube woman didn't like that she'd filmed her allegations while high. And yet she might not have been able to talk about it sober.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“To the naked eye Boudicca is a haze of noxious green that lurks among fronds of seaweed looking exactly like the aftermath of a chemical spill.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“There are people who are drawn to secrets as ants are to jam. Fausta's one of them. She searches out all things unspoken and unseen-not to make them known, but to destroy them so that nobody knows they ever existed. That's what makes her heart beat faster, the destruction of invisible foundations. Why? Because she finds it funny.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“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, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“As nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Lucy understood the mountain's wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life as long as the place stayed standing.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“A house of stone and glass and iron should be stark and sober, a watchtower from which a benevolent guard is kept on society. But the white stone of this particular house rippled as if reacting to a hand that had found its most pleasurable contact. A notable newspaper critic had described this effect as being that of "a pernicious sensuality." And if that wasn't enough, the entire construction blushed a truly disgraceful peachy-pink at sunset and dawn.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“And no matter how many times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the pills were better than holding the child’s hand.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Whenever they were together they couldn't let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that their were either forgotten or misremembered.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Edith Wharton novels for two Henry James novels, Lucia Berlin’s short stories for John Cheever’s, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado for Dany Laferrière’s I Am a Japanese Writer, Dubravka Ugrešić’s Lend Me Your Character for Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarreled and Other Stories, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder for Capote’s In Cold Blood, Lisa Tuttle’s The Pillow Friend for The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“maybe she grew one more in the night and that’s why the night sleep was so deep, it was a matching pair of sleeps. —”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“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, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“A clean-shaven man with a vocal tone reminiscent of post-coital whispers, that was Matyas Füst. The way he sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is no joke.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“El consentimiento es un movimiento descendente, creo -un salto o una caída-, y tanto si lo admiten como si no, hasta las personas más resueltas pueden verse incapaces de decir si dieron su consentimiento libremente. Esa imposibilidad de saber si te lanzaste o si te empujaron provoca una mirada vacía y un característico sentimiento de devastación”.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“El primer paso hacia la rebelión fue descubrir que la desobediencia no suponía el fin del mundo”.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Una biblioteca por la noche está llena de sonidos: los libros no leídos no pueden esperar más y anuncian su contenido, algunos haciendo alardes, otros tímidamente, y otros de forma taimada”.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book—maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“She thought of Professor Chaudhry, one of the professors who’d interviewed her, and how he’d said he liked the connections he could see her making in her mind, and the way that she tried to tend them so that they thrived. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. Usually it was “Aren’t you overthinking things, Day?” But a gardener growing thoughts—she liked that.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Rain fell through sunlight. This was what Sabine Akkerman called fox rain. In her mind’s eye Jill’s mother shook iridescent raindrops off her umbrella and said: “Wolves are hosting wedding feasts and witches are brushing their hair today.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Remember when almost everybody on TV was older than us, Jacob?”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“There was a fire and they couldn’t get out. They would have got out if they could, but they couldn’t, and that’s what killed them. If you can escape then you should.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“After the necessary alterations had been made to both houses Jill and Jacob recorded three conversations—the purpose of which was to place the mourner in the midst of a familiar exchange, the kind we’re always having with friends and family, repeating ourselves and repeating ourselves, going over what we know about each other to prove that we still know these things and will not, cannot, forget them.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“Last night was moonless, and we took a boat out onto Scapa Flow. There was broken light all across the sky, and columns of cloud twisting and turning through the pieces. Dust and dragon fire. Professor Semyonov said: 'That's the Milky Way. As much of it as we can see, anyway.'
It was so beautiful I kept my eyes on it in case it suddenly disappeared, or turned out to be some gigantic illusion.
Maybe it was the rocking of the deck, or maybe I stared for too long, but after a while I felt it all moving against me, the light and the clouds and the darkness, countless stars and planets flying like arrows from a bow hidden further back. Not that we three on the boat were the target; that was just an accident of scale. We crush ants all the time just walking through the park. I thought the best plan was to leave before the sky arrived, just jump into the sea and drown directly. The second-best plan was to close my eyes, but Myrna made me keep looking up. She said her own fear had been that those pinpricks of light were growing and that as they did, she shrank. She made me keep looking up until the panic was singed away. All I knew how to do with puppets, all I used to want to do, was play unsettling tricks. That's not enough any more. I want to put on stubborn little shows, find places here and there where we get to see what we'd be like if we were actually in control of anything. Cruel fantasies, maybe, but they can't hurt any more than glimpsing a galaxy does.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

“You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours