Chigozie Obioma Quotes

You’re a beautiful man.

Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person's skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one's spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them.

All the peace that had returned after his father finished mourning his wife for many years vanished at once. Grief returned like an army of old ants crawling into familiar holes in the soft earth of his father’s life.....

The true being of a man is hidden behind the wall of flesh and blood from the eyes of everyone else, including his own.

They were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join this universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail.

Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known.

There are some rhetorical moves that I wouldn’t be able to make if I didn’t know these languages. In terms of writing figurative language, I probably pull a lot from Yoruba imagery…

Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies. This night will decay, too and you will forget. Listen, we will forget.

I'd heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance - even if faint - to their beginnings

Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart?”

Do you not know that there is nothing the eye can see that can make it shed the tears of blood? Do you not know that there is no loss we cannot overcome

I've always wanted to write something that will show the world that prior to the coming of the British to Nigeria, we had some kind of complex systems. I feel like there hasn't been an African version of, say, Milton's "Paradise Lost" which actually explored the very foundational principle of Western civilization, which would be the free will. Or even Dante Alighieri's "Inferno." So I wanted to write something cosmological, and the chi has been very fascinating to me. It was very difficult, it entailed a lot of research, even down to actually going to shrines and interviewing the last adherents of Odinani, the Igbo religion, now that most Africans are converts to either Christianity or Islam…

Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief.

For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less.

I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what become permanent can be indestructible