List Of Quotes and Sayings by Chinua Achebe

List Of Quotes and Sayings by Chinua Achebe

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“If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.”
― Chinua Achebe
“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”
― Chinua Achebe
“While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.”
― Chinua Achebe
“The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“There is no story that is not true, […] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.”
― Chinua Achebe
“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: “He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
“Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“There is no story that is not true.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“My weapon is literature
”
― Chinua Achebe
“When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”
― Chinua Achebe
“If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’
If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’
But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised. ”
― Chinua Achebe
“If you don’t like my story,write your own”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
  “Then listen to me,’ he said and cleared his throat. ‘It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme. Is it right that you, Okonkwo, should bring your mother a heavy face and refuse to be comforted? Be careful or you may displease the dead. Your duty is to comfort your wives and children and take them back to your fatherland after seven years. But if you allow sorrow to weigh you down and kill you, they will all die in exile.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
― Chinua Achebe
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.

It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw.

Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Nobody can teach me who I am.”
― Chinua Achebe
“Do not despair. I know you will not despair. You have a manly and a proud heart. A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“…when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”
― Chinua Achebe
“Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord’s holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life – to drive the crowd away from His church.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.”
― Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
“Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches!”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”
― Chinua Achebe
“A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room. There is this complexity which seems to me to be part of the meaning of existence and everything we value.”
― Chinua Achebe
“The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”
― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
“Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn’t be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“Mosquito […] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. “How much longer do you think you will live?” she asked. “You are already a skeleton.” Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“At the most one could say that his chi or … personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed. ”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”
― Chinua Achebe

“The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.”

“That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you’re rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world’s stories should be told—from many different perspectives.”
― Chinua Achebe
“There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“If you had been poor in your last life I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked you to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness”
― Chinua Achebe
“Women and music should not be dated.”
― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
“It is only the story…that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.
”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“Charity … is the opium of the privileged; from the good citizen who habitually drops ten kobo from his loose change and from a safe height above the bowl of the leper outside the supermarket; to the group of good citizens (like youselfs) who donate water so that some Lazarus in the slums can have a syringe boiled clean as a whistle for his jab and his sores dressed more hygienically than the rest of him; to the Band Aid stars that lit up so dramatically the dark Christmas skies of Ethiopia. While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world? Do you know that men are sometimes banished for life? Do you know that men sometimes lose all their yams and even their children? I had six wives once. I have none now except that young girl who knows not her right from her left. Do you know how many children I have buried—children I begot in my youth and strength? Twenty-two. I did not hang myself, and I am still alive.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.”
― Chinua Achebe
“Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan.
“It has not always been so,” he said. “My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective – in full earshot of the world.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
tags: african-literature, writing
“The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“…Nothing puzzles God”
― Chinua Achebe, Girls at War and Other Stories
“An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb”
― Chinua Achebe

“Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman’s bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.

To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.”
― Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays
“What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.”

“Unoka went into an inner room and soon returned with a small wooden disc containing a kola nut, some alligator pepper and a lump of white chalk.

“I have kola,” he announced when he sat down, and passed the disc over to his guest.

“Thank you. He who brings kola brings life. But I think you ought to break it,” replied Okoye passing back the disc.

“No, it is for you, I think,” and they argued like this for a few moments before Unoka accepted the honor of breaking the kola. Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have money but to have more kinsmen. We are better than animals because we have kinsmen. An animal rubs its itching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world’s attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
“He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days..”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.”
― Chinua Achebe
“When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.”
― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
“When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. […] But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter’s dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.”
― Chinua Achebe
“He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“…Let me say that I do think decency and civilization would insist that the writer take sides with the powerless. Clearly, there’s no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.”
― Chinua Achebe
“Africa is people” may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
“It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing”
― Chinua Achebe
  “In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.”
― Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
 “Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn’t have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“If we have any role at all, I think it’s the role of optimism, not blind or stupid optimism, but the kind which is meaningful, one that is rather close to that notion of the world which is not perfect, but which can be improved. In other words, we don’t just sit and hope that things will work out; we have a role to play to make that come about.”
― Chinua Achebe
“You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world? Do you know that men are sometimes banished for life? Do you know that men sometimes lose all their yams and even their children? I had six wives once. I have none now except that young girl who knows not her right from her left. Do you know how many children I have buried—children I begot in my youth and strength? Twenty-two. I did not hang myself, and I am still alive. If you think you are the greatest sufferer in the world ask my daughter, Akueni, how many twins she has borne and thrown away. Have you not heard the song they sing when a woman dies? ‘For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well.’ I have no more to say to you.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“For whom is it well, for whom is it well?
There is no one for whom it is well.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“I feel that there has to be a purpose to what we do. If there was no hope at all, we should just sleep or drink and wait for death. But we don’t want to do that. And why? I think something tells us that we should struggle. We don’t really know why we should struggle, but we do, because we think it’s better than sitting down and waiting for calamity.”
― Chinua Achebe
“And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.”
― Chinua Achebe
“What kind of power was it if everybody knew that it would never be used? Better to say that it was not there, that it was no more than the power in the anus of the proud dog who tried to put out a furnace with his puny fart…. He turned the yam with a stick.”
“…stories are not always innocent;…they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.”
― Chinua Achebe
“To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Paradoxically, a saint like [Albert] Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his juniorbrother.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
“I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them”
― Chinua Achebe
“In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
“And now the rains had really come, so heavy and persistent that even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health. The personal dynamism required to counter the forces of these extremes of weather would be far too great for the human frame.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Hanya kisahlah… yang bisa menghindarkan keturunan kita dari membuat kesalahan besar seperti pengemis-pengemis buta yang menabrak duri-duri pagar kaktus.”
(Anthills of The Savannah)”
― Chinua Achebe
“Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“villages that their leaders came together to save themselves.”
― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
 “Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten”
― Chinua Achebe
“The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave.”
― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
“the clock is ticking”
― Chinua Achebe
“With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, nor even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father’s lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future. It was slow and painful. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“One such individual was Amos Tutuola, who was a talented writer. His most famous novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, published in 1946, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, in 1954, explore Yoruba traditions and folklore. He received a great deal of criticism from Nigerian literary critics for his use of “broken or Pidgin English.” Luckily for all of us, Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, was enthralled by Tutuola’s “bewitching literary prose” and wrote glowing reviews that helped Tutuola’s work attain international acclaim. I still believe that Tutuola’s critics in Nigeria missed the point. The beauty of his tales was fantastical expression of a form of an indigenous Yoruba, therefore African, magical realism. It is important to note that his books came out several decades before the brilliant Gabriel García Márquez published his own masterpieces of Latin American literature, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“ان الشمس ستشرق على أولئك الذين يقفون قبل أن تشرق على أولئك الذين يركعون تحت أقدامهم”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Looking at a king’s mouth, ‘ said an old man, ‘one would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art.”
― Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa

“How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do – it can make us identify with situations and people far away.”
― Chinua Achebe
“I do not know how to thank you.’
‘I can tell you,’ said Obierika. ‘Kill one of your sons for me.’
‘That will not be enough,’ said Okonkwo.
‘Then kill yourself,’ said Obierika.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Ife onye metalu’ [‘what a man commits’] – a statement unclear and menacing in its very inconclusiveness. What a man commits…Follows him? Comes back to take its toll? Was that all? No, that was only part of it … The real burden of that cryptic scripture seemed to turn the matter right around. Whatever we see following a man, whatever fate comes to take its revenge on him, can only be what that man in some way or another, in a previous life if not in this, has committed. That was it! So those three words wrapped in an archaic tongue and tucked away at the tail of the bus turn out to be the opening segment of a full-blooded heathen antiphony offering a primitive and quite deadly exposition of suffering. The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight, they will always prosper!”
― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
 “who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted [Nwoye’s] young soul–the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn poured into his parched soul.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“For whom is it well, for whom is it well.
There is no one for whom it is well.”
― Chinua Achebe
“There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had ever witnessed.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
 “The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and re-generation that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.”
― Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
“The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
― Chinua Achebe
 “​Un coeur fier peut survivre à un échec général parce qu’un tel échec ne blesse pas son orgueil. C’est plus difficile et plus amer quand un homme échoue tout seul.”
― Chinua Achebe
Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk”
― Chinua Achebe
“Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.”
― Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
 “He who brings kola brings life.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death.”
― Chinua Achebe, Girls at War
“stories. One of them went regularly to a market in the neighboring village and helped himself to whatever he liked. He went in full uniform, breaking the earth with his boots, and no one dared touch him. It was said that if you touched a soldier, Government”
― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
“A person who has not secured a place on the floor should not begin to look for a mat.”
― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
“had said at the reconciliation meeting, that anger against a kinsman was felt in the flesh, not in the marrow”
― Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
“I am Fire-that-burns-without-faggots.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“If ever a man deserved his success, that man was Okonkwo. At an early age he had achieved fame as the greatest wrestler in all the land. That was not luck. At the most one could say that his chi or personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man say yes his chisays yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed. And not only his chi but his clan too, because it judged a man by the work of his hands.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them.”
― Chinua Achebe
“At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
“Igbo sayings and proverbs are far more valuable to me as a human being in understanding the complexity of the world than the doctrinaire, self-righteous strain of the Christian faith I was taught.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
“No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart“Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today!”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“The rainbow began to appear, and sometimes two rainbows, like a mother and her daughter, the one young and beautiful, and the other an old and faint shadow. The rainbow was called the python of the sky.”
― Chinua Achebe

“Why, he cried in his heart, should he, Okonkwo, of all people, be cursed with such a son. He saw clearly in it the finger of his personal god or chi. For how else could he explain his great misfortune and exile and now his despicable son’s behavior? Now that he had time to think of it, his son’s crime stood out in its stark enormity. To abandon the gods of one’s father and go about with a lot of effeminate men clucking like old hens was the very depth of abomination. Suppose when he died all his male children decided to follow Nwoye’s steps and abandon their ancestors? Okonkwo felt a cold shudder run through him at the terrible prospect, like the prospect of annihilation.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

“no puedo vivir a la orilla de un río y lavarme las manos con saliva.”
― Chinua Achebe, Todo se desmorona

“Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride.”
― Chinua Achebe
tags: life

“His mind, never content with shallow satisfactions, crept to the brink of knowing. What kind of power was it if it would never be used?”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“thoughts could just as well have come to Martin Luther King out of the great Bantu dictum on humanity’s indivisibility: Umuntu ngumuntu nqabantu, “A human is human because of other humans.” We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“Conrad is a dream for psychoanalitic critics”
― Chinua Achebe

“​Il n’y a rien à craindre de quelqu’un qui crie”
― Chinua Achebe

“It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“My weapon is literature.”
― Chinua Achebe

“direction, towards a world of bad systems, bad leadership, and bad followership. The question then is, How do we redirect our steps in a hurry? In other words, where do we begin and have the best chance of success?”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“By the end of World War II Great Britain was financially and politically exhausted. This weakness was exploited by Mohandas Gandhi and his cohorts in India during their own struggle against British rule. Nigerian veterans from different theaters of the war had acquired certain skills—important military expertise in organization, movement, strategy, and combat—during their service to the king. Another proficiency that came naturally to this group was the skill of protest, which was quickly absorbed by the Nigerian nationalists.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“he was as good as any young man, or better because young men were no longer what they used to be.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“Ghana and Nigeria resented each other and competed for supremacy in every sphere—politics, academia, sports, you name it.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever they need them.”
― Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile

“The missionaries had come to Umuofia. They had built their church there, won a handful of converts and were already sending evangelists to the surrounding towns and villages.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There is constant change in the world.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“ Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: ‘Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.’ ”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“anybody who would dismiss them as mere tinkering would have to be a very committed adversary indeed! And he would have to demonstrate, not merely through intellectual abstractions but by pointing to an actual system in practice somewhere which can show better results and no scandals of one form or another.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there. And that is why we say that mother is supreme.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“Any evil which you might have seen with your eyes, or spoken with your mouth, or heard with your ears or trodden with your feet; whatever your father might have brought upon you or your mother brought upon you, I cover them all here.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“And so Mr. Brown came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith.”
― Chinua Achebe
tags: missionaries, nigeria, religion“There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu. “The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest – without asking to be paid.”
― Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People

“In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria’s blockade policies.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest – without asking to be paid.”
― Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People

“Whether the rendezvous of separate histories will take place in a grand, harmonious concourse or be fraught with bitterness and acrimony will all depend on whether we have learned to recognize one another’s presence and are ready to accord human respect to every people.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“[H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“Our elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
tags: things-fall-apart

“Even when there was strong disagreement, one had to remember to be discordant with respect.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“Language is too grand for these chaps; let’s give them dialects!”
― Chinua Achebe

“Letters are, of course, quite special in my view, for when a reader has been sufficiently moved (or even perturbed) by a book to sit down and compose a letter to the author, something very powerful has happened. Things Fall Apart has brought me a large body of such correspondence from people of different ages and backgrounds and from all the continents.”
― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“whether we look at one human family or we look at human society in general, growth can come only incrementally.”
― Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra