Tochi Onyebuchi > Quotes

“When you have a purpose that doesn't involve hurting someone else, it changes the way you walk.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“It's not till she's outside that she realizes what she was looking for in there. What she's been looking for all these years. What she realizes now she no longer needs.
Permission.
I am the locusts, Ella sends the thought out like a concussive wave, so that it hits every surveillance orb in the neighborhood, every wired cop, every crabtank in the nearby precinct. I am the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood.
I'm here now.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“Look at outside. We don't have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can't remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My church-goers can come and go in peace."

"When there isn't a curfew. Pastor, this isn't peace. This is order”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“It’s a battle, really, between me and the pine needles, to see which one of us moves first. But I’m too tired to lose.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Beasts Made of Night

“Peace is not given,” Ngozi says in a voice as hard as the metal of an Igwe. “It is taken. For so long, they have visited violence upon us. It never starts with machetes. It starts with shutting the Igbo out of government. Then it becomes giving all the good jobs to the Hausa andthe Fulani and the Yoruba. Then we are accused of crimes we do not commit. Called animals. They say we infest this country. Then we become the reason the Sahara grows larger and more and more of Nigeria turns to desert. We are blamed for the drought. We are blamed for the radiation. Then we are thrown in jail. Then we are murdered.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, War Girls

“We have tried peaceful protest,” Ngozi continues. “We have tried marching. We have tried registering even those Igbo in the hinterlands to vote in the elections.” She speaks not like she’s reciting from an article or from some downloaded history but from life experience. She speaks like someone whose parents argued politics over thetable at family dinners, like someone who was carried in her father’s arms during those peaceful marches. She speaks like someone who knew a period before war. Before it all turned to violence. “You do not meet hate with love. Some will say that when a hateful person makes you hate, they win. But those people will never say what exactly it is that that hateful person wins. They will say that if you resist hate and meet it with love, that you win. But they never tell us what we win. We see with our eyes. We see that the only thing we win is death by machete. Isolation. Massacre.” Her frown deepens. “They did this”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, War Girls

“And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“In the belly of a surveillance drone somewhere drone somewhere is that moment frozen, perhaps itself deserving of the caption: David versus Goliath.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“They build places like this with ceilings high overhead and walls very far apart to make a person feel small. They build places like this to make it seem like human beings don’t live here. People don’t live here. Things bigger than people do. Out there, you’re angry at the royal family that governs Kos and dictates everyone’s lives. In here, you’re scared of them.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Beasts Made of Night

“The war was an open wound, but no one wanted to treat it. No one wanted to speak of it or deal with it. People went about their lives, living next to the people who had murdered their families. But containing that inside you with no outlet, it destroys a person... The government tells you that there's peace and order and insists on rational dealings. But your mind, whether or not it has been fractured by trauma, knows there's more to life than this. So it protests. But you can't launch vigils or march in the streets, so these protests disappear into your body. They become kidney stones or trouble breathing. Backaches, migraines, neoplasms. Toothaches, depression, psychosis. They mushroom in your interpersonal relationships. Marriages fail, friendships disintegrate, the families left after the war are shattered.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebel Sisters

“But I think that's what you might look like. It's what I think a hero might look like.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology

“Then they get to Mississippi and Ella pauses because Mama sometimes talked about Mississippi and Ella imagines warmth and mosquitoes and tallgrass, haze more than smoke and lounging on cars with the smell of weed making a blanket and somebody’s blasting Motown music out the open doors of their beat-up four-door and everybody is everybody’s cousin and barbecue sauce is suddenly on people’s fingers and bellies bulge with plenty.

Maybe Mama didn’t say all those things when she said the word “Mississippi.” Maybe she didn’t mention the mosquitoes or the music.

But it was the only time Ella ever saw her not look like she was made of iron.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“I feel as though all of a sudden, there’s nothing but forever between here and home.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Beasts Made of Night

“But orphans never steal enough bread for a feast, only enough to last the day." p. 8”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, War Girls

“Everywhere I landed, I didn't really feel like I belonged. Doing postgrad stuff, I felt like I didn't have any skills. Just felt unaccomplished. I was just there to ride out the downturn, and I felt like everybody knew it. Then there's the shame of unemployment. because I wasn't really unemployed. There were plenty of people who were actually looking for jobs. Auntie had lost her job as a tax analyst, turned around and became a nurse. Felt like I was ducking and dodging responsibility. I was just overeducated and useless, taking a job from someone who needed it and deserved it more than me. Got put in a psych ward after a suicide attempt, and when I was in that place, I didn't even feel like I was really depressed or really going through it. Felt like I was faking it to get out of something. Like I was avoiding work. Felt like there was no place for me, because I wasn't capable of working. All my friends who studied econ got jobs overseas, and I was just walking around taking up space.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“when the streets were animated with socio-economic caste struggle, this was a place with all history and no future.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“As God becomes remote to the imagination, the Devil becomes more immediate, eager to take credit for the universe's current order, thereby announcing himself”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, A Righteous Man

“history don’t repeat itself, but it sure as hell rhymes.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“Beloved. Habibi means beloved. I hope this letter gets to you in time.
Find me.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology

“She gets to the church, and it stands out like a single, manicured toenail in a gangrenous foot.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“The bedsheets chilled their bodies with sweat-soak, rumpled beneath them. They lay side by side, David and Jonthan, and, behind their blindfolds, they traced the arc their drones made over earth. Lux levels rose in golden bars just outside their vision as the drones dipped through clouds cover and flew past domed cityscapes. Chicago glowed through a blanket of clouds. The drones swooped upward and dwarf galaxies turned from cosmic smudges into multihued ninja shurikens.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“Onyii stares into space for a long time, looking at nothing, seeing everything.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, War Girls

“How easily can one understand the greatness and omnibenevolence of our God if one’s crops have failed or if one’s child has perished from sickness? Isn’t it hypocrisy to try introducing alien fruit to a spirit caged in a body with more immediate needs? I am preaching to a drowning man of our Lord’s miracles from the safety of my boat.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, A Righteous Man

“Ugh, this is what happens when your building’s full of white people. All of a sudden, everyone cares about your health.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“of the sky fighting against themselves, and if this isn’t apocalypse, it’ll do until the real one gets here.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“…Your population of guards is pulling from the rural South Carolina job Market? Lotta poor white people bein’ eft behind while the planet’s getting’ warmer and the rich folk are fucking off to space. A lot of the bad stuff white did to Black folk, they did to these kids. Some of these kids came in beyond hope. They watched their parents get spied on by police and picked up in unmarked vans. Had their first taste of first-gen toasters. They just knew how the whole system was. They knew and didn’t give a fuck. I think it just made them more likely to blow the whole place up. Ain’t no cage for their kind of angry.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“but do you ever wonder why a seminar on white privilege is just a bunch of white people trying to figure out what’s wrong with being lucky?”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Goliath

“We don’t have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can’t remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My churchgoers can come and go in peace.” “When there isn’t a curfew. Pastor, this isn’t peace. This is order.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“I am the locusts, and the frogs, and the river of blood.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby

“Sometimes I cry and that helps. Not loud or nothin, but real quiet. You know the type where your shoulders heave abd it feels like the sadness is tryna bustbrught outta your body. Just like that.”
― Tochi Onyebuchi, A Universe of Wishes: A We Need Diverse Books Anthology