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Chinua Achebe Quotes | Quotes said by Chinua Achebe

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #1

    ...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.


  • Chinua Achebe Quote #2

    A child cannot pay for its mother's milk

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #3

    A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #8

    Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #9

    As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #12

    Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    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 Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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 Quote #29

    The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

  • Chinua Achebe Quote #30

    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.

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