An Orchestra Of Minorities Quotes

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Even in his most extroverted moment, a man is concealed from others. For he cannot be fully known.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Indeed, hatred is a vandalism of the human heart.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
silence is often a fortress into which a broken man retreats, for it is here that he communes with his mind,
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
He cannot be fully seen by those who look at him, nor can he be fully touched by those who embrace him.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
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 (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori, (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were. Who somebody really was. That was the Zone of interest.
Martin Amis (The Zone of Interest)
Time is not a living creature that can listen to pleas, nor is it a man who can delay.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
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 (An Orchestra of Minorities)
For the truth remains that more can also be more, and that less is often inevitably less.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
as night fell, he gave in to the dark thoughts.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
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 (An Orchestra of Minorities)
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 (An Orchestra of Minorities)
The daily life of lovers often begins to share resemblances, so that, in time, each day becomes indistinguishable from the one that came before it. The lovers carry each other's words in their hearts when apart and when together; they laugh; they talk; they make love; they argue; they eat; they tend to poultry together; they watch television and dream about a future together. This way, time slips and memories accrue until their union becomes the sum of all the words they have said to each other, their laughter, their love-making, their arguments, their eating, their work with the poultry, and all the things they have done together. When that are not with each other, night becomes to them an undesirable thing. They despair at the masking of the sun and wait eagerly for the night, this cosmic sheet that has separated them from their beloved, to pass in fervent haste.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. “The odds of producing an influential or successful idea,” Simonton notes, are “a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” Consider Shakespeare: we’re most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton tracked the popularity of Shakespeare’s plays, measuring how often they’re performed and how widely they’re praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works—Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello—he also churned out the comparatively average Timon of Athens and All’s Well That Ends Well, both of which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development. In every field, even the most eminent creators typically produce a large quantity of work that’s technically sound but considered unremarkable by experts and audiences. When the London Philharmonic Orchestra chose the 50 greatest pieces of classical music, the list included six pieces by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand. In a study of over 15,000 classical music compositions, the more pieces a composer produced in a given five-year window, the greater the spike in the odds of a hit. Picasso’s oeuvre includes more than 1,800 paintings, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, and 12,000 drawings, not to mention prints, rugs, and tapestries—only a fraction of which have garnered acclaim. In poetry, when we recite Maya Angelou’s classic poem “Still I Rise,” we tend to forget that she wrote 165 others; we remember her moving memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and pay less attention to her other 6 autobiographies. In science, Einstein wrote papers on general and special relativity that transformed physics, but many of his 248 publications had minimal impact. If you want to be original, “the most important possible thing you could do,” says Ira Glass, the producer of This American Life and the podcast Serial, “is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work.” Across fields, Simonton reports that the most prolific people not only have the highest originality; they also generate their most original output during the periods in which they produce the largest volume.* Between the ages of thirty and thirty-five, Edison pioneered the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the carbon telephone. But during that period, he filed well over one hundred patents for other inventions as diverse as stencil pens, a fruit preservation technique, and a way of using magnets to mine iron ore—and designed a creepy talking doll. “Those periods in which the most minor products appear tend to be the same periods in which the most major works appear,” Simonton notes. Edison’s “1,093 patents notwithstanding, the number of truly superlative creative achievements can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
Esprits protecteurs de l’humanité, avons-nous vraiment réfléchi aux puissances que déploie la passion chez l’humain ? Avons-nous examiné pourquoi un homme peut traverser un champ de flammes pour atteindre la femme qu’il aime ? Avons-nous réfléchi à l’effet du sexe sur le corps des amants ? À la symétrie de son pouvoir ? Avons-nous étudié ce que la poésie éveille en leur âme, et la marque des mots doux sur un cœur attendri ? Avons-nous contemplé la physionomie de l’amour, analysé pourquoi certaines relations sont mort-nées, d’autres naissent handicapées et atrophiées, tandis que certaines parviennent à l’âge adulte et durent toute la vie des amants ?
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Mais il ignorait encore que rien, jamais, n’appartient pleinement à personne.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Chukwu, as I said before, this kind of fear-induced rumination often occurs when people have been made self-conscious by the presence of others whom they hold in high esteem. They assess themselves by focusing on how others would perceive them. In such situations, there may be no limit to the self-defeating thoughts that may form in the person’s mind, which—no matter how unfounded—may consume them in the end.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Egbunu, I must say that it wasn’t that he responded this way to every woman’s voice, but her voice sounded strangely familiar to him. Although he did not know it, I knew that it reminded him of his mother. At once he saw a plump, swarthy woman who looked his age. She was sweating in the hot sun, and the sweat shimmered along her legs. She carried a tray filled with groundnuts on her head. She was one of the poor—the class of people who had been created by the new civilization. In the time of the old fathers only the lazy, indolent, infirm, or accursed lacked, but now most people did. Go into the streets, into the heart of any market in Alaigbo, and you’ll find toiling men, men whose hands are as hard as stones and whose clothes are drenched in sweat, living in abject poverty. When the White Man came, he brought good things. When they saw the car, the children of the fathers cried out in amusement. The bridges? “Oh, how wonderful!” they said. “Isn’t this one of the wonders of the world?” they said of the radio. Instead of simply neglecting the civilization of their blessed fathers, they destroyed it. They rushed to the cities—Lagos, Port Harcourt, Enugu, Kano—only to find that the good things were in short supply. “Where are the cars for us?” they asked at the gates of these cities. “Only a few have them!” “What about the good jobs, the ones whose workers sit under air conditioners and wear long ties?” “Ah, they are only for those who have studied for years in a university, and even then, you’d still have to compete with the multitude of others with the same qualifications.” So, dejected, the children of the fathers turned back and returned. But to where? To the ruins of the structure they had destroyed. So they live on the bare minimum, and this is why you see people like this woman who walk the length and breadth of the city hawking groundnuts.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
Loneliness is the violent dog that barks interminably through the long night of grief.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
He had joined many others ….all who have been chained and beaten, whose lands have been plundered, whose civilizations have been destroyed, who have been silenced, raped, shamed, killed. With all these people , he’d come to share a common fate, they were the minorities of this world whose only recourse was to join the universal orchestra in which all there was to do was cry and wail.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
for days he thrashed about like an injured worm in the mud of despair.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
the fathers of old say that without light, a person cannot sprout shadows. This woman came as a strange, sudden light that caused shadows to spring from everything else.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
He wept for the dreams washed down the pit of life.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
often leaving him with a crushing envy for a version of himself that never was.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
By that time, already, his life as he once knew it had separated from him like an ill-fated shadow hewn from its bearer and thrown over the cliff into a bottomless pit of oblivion, and even through all these years, he could still hear its dark voice screaming as it continued its fall.
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)
men do not often give deep thoughts to the things they do every day,
Chigozie Obioma (An Orchestra of Minorities)