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Chigozie Obioma

32 quotes

“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.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On archetypes in “'Why Jay?': Chigozie Obioma on the haunting death that inspired his novel” in The Guardian (2019 Jan 18)
“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…”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On his first novel The Fishermen in “'Why Jay?': Chigozie Obioma on the haunting death that inspired his novel” in The Guardian (2019 Jan 18)
“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.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On why his works end on a tragic note (drawn in part from his real-life experience associating with a student named Jay who died untimely) in “'Why Jay?': Chigozie Obioma on the haunting death that inspired his novel” i…
“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.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mother was a falconer. The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what become permanent can be indestructible. The things my brother read shaped him; they became his visions. He believed in them. I have now come to know that what one believes often becomes permanent, and what becomes permanent can be indestructible. This was the case with my brother.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies. This night will decay, too and you will forget. Listen, we will forget.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That story, as all good stories, planted a seed in my soul and never left me.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'd heard someone say that the end of most things often bears a resemblance - even if faint - to their beginnings”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I must have my pound of flesh and you must all join me in this because you caused it.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“M.K.O., you are beautiful beyond description,”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We did it. We avenged them”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true being of a man is hidden behind the wall of flesh and blood from the eyes of everyone else, including his own.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.....”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in Umuahia, a town in the land of the great fathers...”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re a beautiful man.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Stories are one of the oldest ways human beings have tried to understand themselves and the world around them.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every novel teaches me that writing is an act of humility because each book demands that you learn everything again.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think literature changes the world directly. It changes people, and people change the world.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The novelist's first responsibility is to tell the truth of the story, wherever that truth leads.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grew up listening to stories before I ever imagined writing them.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What fascinates me most is the mystery of why human beings become who they become.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing allows me to preserve worlds that are disappearing before our eyes.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A novel should leave readers asking deeper questions rather than offering easy answers.”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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…”
Chigozie Obioma (born 1986) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On what he envisioned for his novel An Orchestra of Minorities in “The Spirit Tells The Story In 'Orchestra Of Minorities'” in NPR (2019 Jan 5)