Chinua Achebe Quotes

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

We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling, that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty's empire. If Ghana seemed more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed, expert hands. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near. ~ Chinua Achebe

If one finger brings oil it soils the others. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely. ~ Chinua Achebe

My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment. ~ Chinua Achebe

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all. ~ Chinua Achebe

There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts. ~ Chinua Achebe

It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair. ~ Chinua Achebe

Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass? ~ Chinua Achebe

Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important
and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important. ~ 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

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse! ~ Chinua Achebe

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

Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone. We rise above the animal together, or not at all. If we learned that lesson even this late in the day, we would have taken a truly millennial step forward. ~ Chinua Achebe

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

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

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

Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not. ~ Chinua Achebe

As they stood there together, Ekwefi's mind went back to the days when they were young. She had married Anene because OKonkwo was too poor then to marry. Two years after her marriage to Anene she could bear it no longer and she ran away to Okonkwo. It had been early in the morning. The moon was shining. She was going to the stream to fetch water. Okonkwo's house was on the way to the stream. She went in and knocked at his door and he came out. Even in those days he was not a man of many words. He just carried her into his bed and in the darkness began to feel around her waist for the loose end of her cloth. ~ Chinua Achebe

Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache ~ Chinua Achebe

An angry man is always a stupid man. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

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

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

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

Women and music should not be dated. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches! ~ Chinua Achebe

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

As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us. ~ Chinua Achebe

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership. ~ Chinua Achebe

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He ~ Chinua Achebe

That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint. ~ Chinua Achebe

He is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged. ~ Chinua Achebe

What really worries me is that those who are in positions of power are not really affected by what we are writing. In the moral dialogue you want to start, you really want to involve the leaders. People ask me: "Why were you so bold as to publish A Man of the People? How did you think the Government was going to take it? You didn't know there was going to be a coup?" I said rather flippantly that nobody was going to read it anyway, so I wasn't likely to be fired from my official position. It's a distressing thought that we cannot engage our leaders in the kind of moral debate we need. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with every-day herbs. ~ 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 singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world. ~ Chinua Achebe

The poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne'er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are greater than their badge of suffering, because they are human. ~ Chinua Achebe

tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. 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 ~ Chinua Achebe

Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

The Igbo culture, being receptive to change, individualistic, and highly competitive, gave the Igbo man an unquestioned advantage over his compatriots in securing credentials for advancement in Nigerian colonial society. Unlike the Hausa/Fulani he was unhindered by a wary religion, and unlike the Yoruba he was unhampered by traditional hierarchies. This kind of creature, fearing no god or man, was custom-made to grasp the opportunities, such as they were, of the white man's dispensations. And ~ Chinua Achebe

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

And so Mr. Brown came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith. ~ Chinua Achebe

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories. ~ Chinua Achebe

No man however great is greater than his people ~ Chinua Achebe

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be. ~ Chinua Achebe

A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them? ~ Chinua Achebe

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality. ~ Chinua Achebe

A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday. ~ Chinua Achebe

How can a man who has killed five men in a battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their family number?. Okonkwo,you have become a woman indeed.
Chapter 8,pg56 ~ Chinua Achebe

What kind of power was it if it would never be used? ~ Chinua Achebe

The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively. ~ Chinua Achebe

Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil ~ Chinua Achebe

Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble. ~ Chinua Achebe

If you don't like my story,write your own ~ Chinua Achebe

There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. ~ Chinua Achebe

I don't care about age very much. ~ Chinua Achebe

[H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others. ~ 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

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

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

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

Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country. ~ Chinua Achebe

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

An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb ~ Chinua Achebe

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

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

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