Best of Helen Oyeyemi's "Peaces"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi.
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| Painting above: The Lovers by Leonora Carrington (c.1987) |
You run the romantic gauntlet for decades without knowing who exactly it is you're giving and taking such a battering in order to reach. You run the gauntlet without knowing whether the person whose favour you seek will even be there once you somehow put that path strewn with sensory confetti and emotional gore behind you. And then, by some stroke of fortune the gauntlet concludes, the person does exist after all, and you become that perpetually astonished lover from so many of the songs you used to find endlessly disingenuous.
p.5
If you stuck out your tongue it would dance there, right at the top: the fizz of conditionality.
p.7
I'm sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning that flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good.
p.16
And then there's the look in her eyes. The look of Eve in Eden...some amalgam of devotion and brutality that's only really satisfied by encounters with the interior and therefore eviscerates everything in sight.
p.18
"Well I wouldn't say 'definitely' not, because things always take some kind of crazy turn when you say 'definitely'."
p.34
You have a better time when you're not expecting anything real. That's why seriously tacky people manage to enjoy themselves wherever they are.
p.57
Most people feel themselves depart as they arrive at their station. We'd all like to keep the impressions we just gathered, keep the hope we had and the interest we took in our surroundings; we'd like to be like that all the time and every day, but by the time you get home, that's all snuffed out.
p.61
His daughter resembled him abut the nose but had otherwise branched out on her own with a patron-saint-of-adventuresses look.
p.62
He's the only other person I know who can read, drink, and converse at the same time, and his drunken TED Talks take on a different character depending on what he's reading.
p.80
I thought, but didn't say, that there was something vaguely compulsive about the way that when we were together we thought and talked about anything and everything except the train we were on. But that was probably our issue, not the train's.
p.81-82
"[...] A Brontean moment can never be averted."
p.92
Trainers only ever stay as clean as the conscience of their wearer.
p.92
It was quite a violent blue, that lake. A colour that ripped the horizon. Some lakes are calm, and some are tense. This one was a thunderous mass at war with the sky, David shaking a watery fist at Goliath and roaring, I'll drown you!
p.101-102
He's unable to extricate himself from hopeful undertakings. Deeds that probably won't change anybody's world for the better but just might.
p.210
It's easy to overdo things in the sincere pursuit of tranquility.
p.211
Good weather is exciting for the sociable yet self-conscious; it's a chance to discuss something positive without appearing to boast or pry.
p.256
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