Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

In real life, I don't cry too easily. I go numb.

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

When you're unhappy, you tend to play up, don't you?

I'm very free with all my emotions, whether it's happy, sad, mad, glad, whatever.

When you have a tough childhood, you either cry or make a joke.

The sentimental view of anything is apt to be ridiculous, but I feel that I have been unusually sensitive to the issue of place since I was a little boy.

The belief that a person can and should only feel grief over one sad event at a time is a truly disturbing estimate of our emotional capacity.

I'm pretty good at remaining calm during an emergency. My house burned down when I was 12, which made me really pragmatic about what needed to be done. But I can be bad in that I compartmentalize a lot of emotions and push them away to deal with them at a later date.

When my parents were getting divorced, I just said to myself, 'Go to sleep, and tomorrow you can go skiing.' I cried myself to sleep, and in the morning I was up on the mountain, and I was good.

I first came across the script for 'Macbeth' between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.

I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.

I was a very sensitive kid who then had to condition myself to desensitize.

Sometimes I get ideas from childhood. In 'The Hat', Hedgie starts getting teased about his hat, and he just pretends that everything is okay. That's the advice that my mother gave me - not to get mad and pretend that everything is okay. And it worked.

I guess they're tough jokes. But there's lots of things you either laugh or cry at. And you just can't cry.

I've got a quiet voice. I think it's because as a child I didn't speak very much. I used to put my fingers in my ears to feel the silence, which was like a lovely trickling motion in my head.

'Johnny' was a coping mechanism who could take those things which could have ordinarily destroyed me, by tweaking my past and throwing it back out there, getting laughs from things that would have otherwise upset me.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

If someone made fun of me, I'd be bummed out. But I'd play it like I thought it was hilarious.

Just like my mom, when things get bad, I get quiet. The worse they get, the more silent I become.

Fear is often our immediate response to uncertainty. There's nothing wrong with experiencing fear. They key is not to get stuck in it.

I feel like, as a girl, I would have reacted or maybe been more depressed about some of the things that would have happened in my life if I didn't have music.

Apparently, when I was really little, I watched the film version of 'The Secret Garden' and thought it was, like, the best thing ever.

As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.

If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.

Laughing doesn't make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn't mean you don't care, or that you've forgotten. It just means you're human.