Top 100 Achebe Quotes
#1. Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye ... I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#2. SOYINKA WON THE NOBEL PRIZE
ACHEBE, LITERARY COMMANDER
P.D. JAMES, WE LOVE HER
AGATHA CHRISTIE, QUEEN OF CRIME
S.A. David
#3. In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.
Mos Def
#4. There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe's work. We are either resisting him - stylistically, politically, or culturally - or we are writing toward him.
Chris Abani
#5. My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.
Chris Abani
#8. I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.
Chinua Achebe
#9. Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves
Chinua Achebe
#10. A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.
Chinua Achebe
#11. A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
Chinua Achebe
#13. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.
Chinua Achebe
#14. I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.
Chinua Achebe
#15. 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
#16. What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.
Chinua Achebe
#17. A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness
Chinua Achebe
#18. Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.
Chinua Achebe
#19. 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
#20. In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.
Chinua Achebe
#21. A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?
Chinua Achebe
#22. 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
#24. 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
#25. [Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?
Chinua Achebe
#26. 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
#27. A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Chinua Achebe
#28. 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
#30. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye
Chinua Achebe
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Each of my books is different. Deliberately ... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
Chinua Achebe
#35. 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
#36. The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
Chinua Achebe
#37. 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
#38. When we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
Chinua Achebe
#39. No man however great is greater than his people
Chinua Achebe
#40. The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them.
Chinua Achebe
#41. 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
#42. Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.
Chinua Achebe
#44. You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.
Chinua Achebe
#45. 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
#46. One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
Chinua Achebe
#47. Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache
Chinua Achebe
#48. Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
Chinua Achebe
#49. There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.
Chinua Achebe
#50. Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.
Chinua Achebe
#51. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.
Chinua Achebe
#58. When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.
Chinua Achebe
#59. 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
#60. It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
Chinua Achebe
#61. The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
Chinua Achebe
#62. The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
Chinua Achebe
#63. 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
#64. An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.
Chinua Achebe
#65. The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave.
Chinua Achebe
#66. Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.
Chinua Achebe
#67. A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
Chinua Achebe
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
#71. If you don't like someone's story, write your own.
Chinua Achebe
#72. Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
Chinua Achebe
#73. He who fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime.
Chinua Achebe
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?
Chinua Achebe
#77. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities
Chinua Achebe
#78. Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Chinua Achebe
#79. 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
#80. There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
Chinua Achebe
#81. 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
#82. Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe
#83. Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
#84. 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
#85. My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gathered
Chinua Achebe
#86. When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father's estate
Chinua Achebe
#87. 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
#88. I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
Chinua Achebe
#89. 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
#90. The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
Chinua Achebe
#91. A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.
Chinua Achebe
#92. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.
Chinua Achebe
#93. For whom is it well, for whom is it well.
There is no one for whom it is well.
Chinua Achebe
#94. When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
Chinua Achebe
#95. The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
Chinua Achebe
#96. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.
Chinua Achebe
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
Chinua Achebe
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