Chigozie Obioma Quotes

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…

in Umuahia, a town in the land of the great fathers...

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.

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.

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

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.....

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…

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

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

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?”

Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay.

I believe that some of the strongest stories we can have begin with very simple archetypes…The great mother, or the great father, for example. And you work your way from that, slowly, to more complexity. The idea of this guy who wants to be with the woman he loves – you can say the same of the movie Gladiator, for instance. If you strip everything down to the basics, it’s just about Maximus wanting to go back to his wife and every other thing stopping him. Even Homer’s Odyssey; he just wants to go back and the entire universe is conspiring against that ambition.

You’re a beautiful man.

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