Top 100 Chinua Achebe Quotes
#1. A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.
Chinua Achebe
#2. A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness
Chinua Achebe
#3. 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
#4. When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
Chinua Achebe
#6. 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.
Chinua Achebe
#7. When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.
Chinua Achebe
#8. A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Chinua Achebe
#9. 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 junior brother.
Chinua Achebe
#11. 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
#12. 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.
Chinua Achebe
#13. 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
#14. Each of my books is different. Deliberately ... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
Chinua Achebe
#15. The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.
Chinua Achebe
#16. When we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
Chinua Achebe
#17. No man however great is greater than his people
Chinua Achebe
#18. The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them.
Chinua Achebe
#19. 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
#20. You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.
Chinua Achebe
#21. In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Chinua Achebe
#22. One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
Chinua Achebe
#23. Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
Chinua Achebe
#24. Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.
Chinua Achebe
#26. People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.
Chinua Achebe
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
Chinua Achebe
#30. An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.
Chinua Achebe
#31. The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave.
Chinua Achebe
#32. 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
#33. I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.
Chinua Achebe
#34. When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
#35. Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
Chinua Achebe
#36. 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
#37. When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?
Chinua Achebe
#38. There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
Chinua Achebe
#39. 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
#40. Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
#41. My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gathered
Chinua Achebe
#42. When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father's estate
Chinua Achebe
#43. I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
Chinua Achebe
#44. An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.
Chinua Achebe
#45. For whom is it well, for whom is it well.
There is no one for whom it is well.
Chinua Achebe
#46. When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
Chinua Achebe
#47. The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
Chinua Achebe
#48. There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
Chinua Achebe
#49. If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
Chinua Achebe
#50. That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.
Chinua Achebe
#51. The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.
Chinua Achebe
#52. They say a man is like a funeral ram which must take whatever beating comes to it without opening its mouth; only the silent tremor of pain down its body tells of its suffering.
Chinua Achebe
#53. 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
#54. The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There is constant change in the world.
Chinua Achebe
#55. 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
#56. If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
Chinua Achebe
#57. A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.
Chinua Achebe
#58. A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
Chinua Achebe
#59. 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
#60. Who ever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with greatness in men.
Chinua Achebe
#61. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.
Chinua Achebe
#63. The writer is often faced with two choices
turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
Chinua Achebe
#64. When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.
Chinua Achebe
#65. The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.
Chinua Achebe
#66. Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
Chinua Achebe
#67. The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
Chinua Achebe
#68. Beware Okonkwo!" she warned. "Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!
Chinua Achebe
#69. The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.
Chinua Achebe
#70. If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others.
Chinua Achebe
#73. Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
Chinua Achebe
#74. A proud heart can survive a general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride.
Chinua Achebe
#75. In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.
Chinua Achebe
#76. The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.
Chinua Achebe
#77. I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
Chinua Achebe
#78. Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.
Chinua Achebe
#79. 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
#80. Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.
Chinua Achebe
#81. A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with every-day herbs.
Chinua Achebe
#82. People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
Chinua Achebe
#83. [H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others.
Chinua Achebe
#84. Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.
Chinua Achebe
#85. To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
Chinua Achebe
#86. My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.
Chinua Achebe
#87. I don't care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
Chinua Achebe
#88. This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.
Chinua Achebe
#89. 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
#90. We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret
perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.
Chinua Achebe
#92. 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
#93. The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.
Chinua Achebe
#94. Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.
Chinua Achebe
#96. Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.
Chinua Achebe
#97. A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet.
Chinua Achebe
#98. 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
#99. The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again.
Chinua Achebe
#100. 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
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