Helen Oyeyemi Quotes

How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?

Here's a tip. If you touch a girl, even as joke, and she pushes you off, leave... her... alone. Don't touch her. Anywhere! Just stop. Your touch does nothing but sicken her.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don't know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

The difference between rape and seduction is salesmanship.

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.

It was less humiliating to admit crying because of your feet than because - because somebody had been amusing himself with you and your friends had forgotten you, and other people patronised you.

I'm overwhelmed by shame that the people who had the responsibility to take care of the tender ones violated that trust and caused them great pain.

I have never been So insulted in all my life I could swallow the seas To wash down all this pride First you run like a fool Just to be at my side And now you run like a fool But you just run to hide.

Most of my friends that I know now [were sexually assaulted] stayed silent. And I see that still happening today. A lot of women will stay silent and not share what happened to them.

Are we even now? Or do you want to rape my body as much as you’ve raped my soul? (Acheron)

I wanted to run after him, but remembered that it is ridiculous to run after one's wife's lover in one's socks; and I did not wish to be ridiculous but terrible.

How I feel is cheap and used, dirty and humiliated. Dirty and tricked and thrown away.

weeping...betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreparable that the mind balks at taking its measure.

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.

My wish for the world would be to end violence against women. My wish for myself would be for peace of mind.

I'm a survivor. But I'm also victim, too. Surviving has the connotation that you've been through it, you lived through it and that's wonderful - but a victim is what I was. "Survivor" is the more healing way to look at it.

He understands my pity for his ridiculous, humiliating physical necessity.

It's not right to hurt or deceive someone who's already been hurt and deceived.

How to seperate the humiliation from the loss, that's the catch. You can never be sure if what tortures you is the pain of being without someone you love or the embarrassment of admitting that you have been rejected.

She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn't scream when he took the first bite.

Everything is reduced to what's physical in the end, because it's the filth inside people's minds that creates all the evil. What is a body, anyway? I suppose you've got to abuse your body to understand it. If you're not prepared to humiliate yourself in order to give somebody else a moment's pleasure, I don't believe that you've actually lived.

At least Lester had the decency to weep at his act of perfidy. Reader, do you know what 'perfidy' means? I have a feeling you do, based on the scene that unfolded here. But you should look up the word in your dictionary, just to be sure.

Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off.