73
" Listen, there’s this little girl who makes herself laugh. You hear her from the other room, and when you try to get her to explain, she just says: ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And maybe it’s the thief in me, but I think this girl is mine, and that when she and I are around each other, we’re giving each other something we’ve never had, or taking back something we’ve lost. "
― Helen Oyeyemi , Boy, Snow, Bird
74
" That woman - the me that had married Charlie - had tried and failed to find a gap in all of this that was so ordinary, to take some instrument to the gap and shape it, widen it until it got big enough to slip through. She'd wanted to make a beautiful thing, like the Flax Hill natives did. But not a lantern or a bookcase, a life. Not to have what it takes, and to be surrounded by witnesses too. The man you tried with. The children. A boy version of you, or a girl version of him, or both, looking at you with clear, pitiless eyes. "
― Helen Oyeyemi , Boy, Snow, Bird
79
" Look… the way it was when I was a kid, the person you’d treated badly had to hurt you back, or there were two possibilities. The first was that you continued to like them but you lost respect for them, because in the world of kid think, not taking revenge can be a sign of weakness. The other option, and this is something that continues into adult think, is that the other person’s not taking their moment to hurt you made you stop liking them as much. You started to fear them, because it seemed like they were waiting for a better chance, a chance not just to hurt you, but to devastate you. The only way for there to be both liking and respect is if you hit me now and we call it quits. "
― Helen Oyeyemi , Boy, Snow, Bird