She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.

— Helen Oyeyemi

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.

— Helen Oyeyemi

She retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. "Firstly, they cut us down," Rowan said. "Secondly they're all insane, though I suppose they can't help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.

— Helen Oyeyemi

So she quit working to make sense of things— we don’t realize it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance.

— Helen Oyeyemi

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

… there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.

— Helen Oyeyemi

The way that people feel changes everything. Feelings are forces. They cause us to time travel. And to leave ourselves, to leave our bodies. I would be that kind of psychologist who says, 'You're absolutely right - there are monsters under the bed.'

— Helen Oyeyemi

The wooden devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn't even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. 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 they were either forgotten or misremembered.

— Helen Oyeyemi

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.

— Helen Oyeyemi

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

— Helen Oyeyemi