Best Of Helen Oyeyemi's "The Opposite House"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi.

From Chabella, I've learnt how to fight anyone, man or woman, whilst sitting down completely still. It's all in the quality, not the quantity of tears; the soundless shudder as if the water comes from a deep place lined with rocks.

p.10

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 [...] 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.

p.11

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.

p.14

I told her about the shadow at night, and she talked about the Cloud of Unknowing, how when God is near, you are driven into the darkness outside of reason and it is a good, sweet rest. I tried to explain that it wasn't unknowing. But mystics are difficult to argue with.

p.18

And I speak like this because it is important that I'm understood. In a country where ears are attuned to courteous, clipped white noise, being asked to repeat myself batters down the words in me, makes my tongue fall down my throat.

p.22

Dominique took the names calmly, without offering any insults of her own, which I couldn't understand. 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.

p.93

Her parents' house smells of church incense and is full of things like jade vases and brushed suede. It's the sort of place where you periodically flinch, not because anyone's raised a hand to you but because you realise that you are surrounded by objects that some would consider are worth more than you.

p.115

She is startling in a way that doesn't really exist anymore, only still around because she is preserved, delayed.

p.116

(she told me that for the entire day [of her wedding] she was so happy that she thought she must faint, or die--nothing happened except that her heart grew fuller)

p.143

"Spirituality doesn't protest injustice, it just bears it. I don't want that. I want you to think."

p.207

When Mami used to cornrow his hair for him he would think of something and get impatient halfway through and wander around the house looking for the book with the paragraph that was perfect for that starburst of thought.

p.224