Chigozie Obioma > Chigozie's Quotes

“Everything followed its natural course. We gave little thought to past events. Time meant nothing back then. The days came with clouds hanging in the sky filled with cupfuls of dust in the dry seasons, and the sun lasting into the night. It was as if a hand drew hazy pictures in the sky during the rainy seasons, when rain fell in deluges pulsating with spasms of thunderstorms for six uninterrupted months. Because things followed this known and structured pattern, no day was worthy of remembrance. All that mattered was the present and the foreseeable future.”
― Chigozie Obioma

“Mother vanished for many days. She was, as I would find out later, in a psychiatric hospital, tucked away as if she were a dangerous explosive material. There had been a cataclysmic explosion of her mind, and her perception of the known world had been blasted into smithereens.Her senses became imbued with extraordinary sensitivity so that to her ears the sound of the clock in her ward
became noisier than the din of a drilling machine. The sound of a
rat came to her as the peal of many bells.”
― Chigozie Obioma

“The prophecy, like an angered beast, had gone berserk and was destroying his mind with the ferocity of madness . . . until all that he knew, all that was him, all that had become him was left in disarray. To my brother, Ikenna, the fear of death as prophesied by Abulu had become palpable, a caged world within which he was irretrievably trapped, and beyond which nothing else existed.”
― Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

“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, The Fishermen

“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, The Fishermen

“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, The Fishermen