Latest Helen Oyeyemi Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The language of [Catholic] mysticism - its repeated attempts to lay consciousness itself bare and speak all the intensely opposing yet interconnected parts of it that cannot be spoken.

  Helen Oyeyemi

  Catholic, Language, Consciousness

• Magic is an exercise of a pattern of thought (sometimes represented by a gesture, ritual, or the calling of a true name) that results in manifestation/s. But these patterns of thought can have so much to do with whimsy that magic often is jokes.

  Helen Oyeyemi

  Exercise, Names, Often Is

• It's true that writing can give new forms to concepts that existed previously with far less clarity, but in terms of the other half of a story's story - the way a story is received and interpreted and used - the audience plays a part in that too.

  Helen Oyeyemi

  Writing, Play, Giving

  "Something Just Beyond Words". Interview with Molly McArdle, logger.believermag.com. April 25, 2014.

• I see all mythology as one tradition, a way of disseminating knowledge that must come to us in code so that we can live sanely with it, since some forms of knowledge are too dark, or too complex, to be plainly spoken. And so we have these weird (and also sometimes entertaining and surprising and heartening) tales that belong to all of us.

  Helen Oyeyemi

  Dark, Way, Sometimes

  "'Something Just Beyond Words'". Interview with Molly McArdle, logger.believermag.com. April 25, 2014.