Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl
- Her mother's voice sounded through the hallway, mixing with the mustiness around her so well that the sound almost had a smell. To Jess, sitting in the cupboard, the sound of her name was strange, wobbly, misformed, as if she were inside a bottle, or a glass cube, maybe, and Mum was outside it, tapping. -
- Jess liked haiku. She thought they were incredible and really sort of terrible. She felt, when reading over the ones she'd written herself, as if she were being punched very hard, just once, with each haiku. -
- 'Maybe that's why you get so sad,' she said, 'because you're so clever.' -
- All my thoughts have left, / with her. / I thought I'd kept them in my head / But when I tried to find the thoughts / They all told me she was / dead. -
- Jess blinked. It was incredible that her mother could really believe that a mother's dreams, a mother's fears, were the same as her child's, as if these things could be passed on in the same way as her frizzy hair had been, or the shape of her nose. -
- Two hungry people should never make friends. If they do, they eat each other up. It is the same with one person who is hungry and another who is full: they cannot be real, real friends because the hungry one will eat the full one. . . Only two people who are full up can be friends. They don't want anything from each other except friendship... -
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