Chigozie Obioma Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.....

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…

People always ask me, why do your stories end this way? And honestly…I want to write a feelgood story. But I think that because I’m fascinated with the metaphysics of existence, I keep thinking why, of all the people who came to Cyprus, was it Jay who died? Or, I read not too long ago of a nine-year-old doing her homework and there’s a drive-by shooting and a bullet comes in through the roof and kills her. She didn’t do anything to deserve that fate. When you think about these things, and you want to write fiction around that, the path it takes you to can feel inevitable and tragic.

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…

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

That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me.