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Mr. Fox QUOTES

Mr. Fox QUOTES

1 " He honestly expected her to believe that she could make a bad offering and her ancestors wouldn't mind. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

2 " I’m never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that’s almost as good as being there yourself. You’re in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the further away your friends, and the more spread out they are the better your chances of going safely through the world… "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

3 " I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

4 " Young men ... learn practical skills that set is in good stead for lives as the husbands of wealthy and educated women: Strong Handshakes, Silence, Rudimentary Car Mechanics, How to Mow the Lawn, Explosive Displays of Authority, Sport and Nutrition Against Impotance. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

5 " So she quit working to make sense of things— we don’t realise it, but it’s hard work we do almost every waking moment, building out thoughts and memories and actions around time, things that happened yesterday, and things that are happening right now, and what’s coming tomorrow, layering all of that simultaneously and holding it in balance. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

6 " [i]We were fighting so very hard and achieving so very little aside from staying alive. BUT THAT’S EVERYTHING, my father wrote to me, when I told him that in a letter.[/i] "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

7 " She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

8 " I would like to have nothing to do with you for hours on end and then come back and find you, come back with things I’ve thought and found all on my own— on my own, not through you. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

9 " … there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

10 " And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe's head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess - dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship.

That is not what happened. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

11 " I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I've lived too long. I'm twenty-two. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

12 " He was talented, at an age when other boys were horrible kissers, just horrible and sloppy. I was fourteen then, and he was sixteen. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

13 " Love. I'm not capable of it, can't even approach it from the side, let alone head-on. Nor am I alone in this—everyone is like this, the liars. Singing songs and painting pictures and telling each other stories about love and its mysteries and marvelous properties, myths to keep morale up—maybe one day it'll materialize. But I can say it ten times a day, a hundred times, 'I love you,' to anyone and anything, to a woman, to a pair of pruning shears. I've said it without meaning it at all, taken love's name in vain and gone dismally unpunished. Love will never be real, or if it is, it has no power. No power. There's only covetousness, and if what we covet can't be won with gentle words—and often it can't—then there is force. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

14 " Subdue this. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

15 " The water is very green and has a sweet taste, both boys wrote in their diaries, at different times. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

16 " I almost forgot to mention another fox I know of—a very wicked fox indeed. But you are tired of hearing about foxes now, so I won't go on. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

17 " Our exchanges always seem to turn into whatever he wants them to. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

18 " Miss Foxe's other passion was fairy tales. She loved the transformations in them. Everybody was in disguise, or on their way to becoming something else. And all was overcome by order in the end. Love could not prevail if the order of the tale didn't wish it, and neither could hatred, nor grief, nor cunning. If you were the first of three siblings, then you were going to make a big mistake, and that was that. If you were the third sibling, you couldn't fail. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

19 " She told him that she had looked after him because of the white hairs on his forehead that grew into the shape of a star. Sometimes you see that someone is marked and you're helpless after that - you love. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox

20 " Mary. If you were real I'd run away with you forever. "

― Helen Oyeyemi , Mr. Fox