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Chinua Achebe Quotes

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart , often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature.Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College . He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and soon moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention for his novel Things Fall Apart in the late 1950s; his later novels include No Longer at Ease , Arrow of God , A Man of the People , and Anthills of the Savannah . Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" featured a criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist"; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.

When the region of Biafra broke away from Nigeria in 1967, Achebe became a supporter of Biafran independence and acted as ambassador for the people of the new nation. The civil war that took place over the territory, commonly known as the Nigerian Civil War, ravaged the populace, and as starvation and violence took its toll, he appealed to the people of Europe and the Americas for aid. When the Nigerian government retook the region in 1970, he involved himself in political parties but soon resigned due to frustration over the corruption and elitism he witnessed. He lived in the United States for several years in the 1970s, and returned to the U.S. in 1990, after a car crash left him partially disabled.

A titled Igbo chief himself, Achebe's novels focus on the traditions of Igbo society, the effect of Christian influences, and the clash of Western and traditional African values during and after the colonial era. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. He also published a large number of short stories, children's books, and essay collections.

Upon Achebe's return to the United States in 1990, he began an eighteen-year tenure at Bard College as the Charles P. Stevenson Professor of Languages and Literature. From 2009 until his death, he served as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. November 1930 – 21. March 2013
Chinua Achebe photo

Works

Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
No Longer at Ease
No Longer at Ease
Chinua Achebe
Anthills of the Savannah
Anthills of the Savannah
Chinua Achebe
Arrow of God
Arrow of God
Chinua Achebe
Chinua Achebe: 63   quotes 45   likes

Famous Chinua Achebe Quotes

“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

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: 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 book Things Fall Apart

Variant: The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 15 (p. 130)
Context: "We have heard stories about white men who make the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true." [said Obierika]
"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. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?"

Chinua Achebe Quotes about people

“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

Source: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

“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. And not only his chi but his clan too, because it judged a man by the work of his hands.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 4 (p. 29)

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

“But he was not the man to go about telling his neighbors that he was in error. And so people said he had no respect for the gods of the clan. His enemies said that his good fortune had gone to his head.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 4 (p. 32)

Chinua Achebe: Trending quotes

“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 book Anthills of the Savannah

Source: Anthills of the Savannah

World , Forgetting

“Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 16 (p. 133)

Faith , Dogs , Madness

“The white man is very clever. He came quietly 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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 20 (p. 162)

Religion

Chinua Achebe Quotes

“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”

Chinua Achebe book Arrow of God

Arrow of God (1988)

World , Dance

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

“If you don't like my story, write your own”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Variant: If you don't like someone's story, write your own.
Source: Things Fall Apart

“Nobody can teach me who I am.”

Chinua Achebe

“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
History , Memory

“Charity… is the opium of the privileged.”

Chinua Achebe book Anthills of the Savannah

Source: Anthills of the Savannah

“There is no story that is not true.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

“My weapon is literature”

Chinua Achebe
Literature

“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

Variant: 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.

Suffering

“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 2 (p. 14)

“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 book Anthills of the Savannah

Source: Anthills of the Savannah

Freedom , Universe

“A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

“The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 1 (p. 11)

Sun

“When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.”

Chinua Achebe book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease (1960), Chapter 10 (p. 95)

Tree , Sun

“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb"He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.”

Chinua Achebe

Source: The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

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

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

Art

“A proud heart can survive 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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 27)

Motivational , Back To Work , Failure , Heart

“… when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.”

Chinua Achebe

Source: The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays

“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

Source: Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Imagination

“It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart

Despair

“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 book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease

“As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 22 (p. 170)

Dance

“There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”

Chinua Achebe

Source: There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Thinking

“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 book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease (1960), Chapter 9 (p. 87)

Understanding

“For an African writing in English is not without its serious setbacks. He often finds himself describing situations or modes of thought which have no direct equivalent in the English way of life. Caught in that situation he can do one of two things. He can try and contain what he wants to say within the limits of conventional English or he can try to push back those limits to accommodate his ideas … I submit that those who can do the work of extending the frontiers of English so as to accommodate African thought-patterns must do it through their mastery of English and not out of innocence.”

Chinua Achebe

Quoted by Kalu Ogbaa, Understanding Things Fall Apart (1999), Greenwood Press, ISBN 978-0-313-30294-7.

Life , Way , Idea

“It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 14 (pp. 120–121)

Life , Youth , Age , Learning

“Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: "Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig."”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 24 (p. 203)

Men , Bird , Learning , Flying

“The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. 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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 115)

Life , Death , Birth

“After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation--a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 9 (p. 75)

Thinking

“A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.”

Chinua Achebe book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease (1960), Chapter 1 (p. 17)

“When did you become a shivering old woman," Okonkwo asked himself, "you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 8 (pp. 62–63)

Men , War , Boy

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 22)

Life , Children , Happiness

“"Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory." […] They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their great amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 17 (p. 139)

Death , Evil , Victory

“If one finger brings oil it soils the others.”

Chinua Achebe book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease (1960), Chapter 7 (p. 75)

“In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. […] One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 25 (p. 191)

Books , Tree , Learning , Parting

“Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 24 (p. 186)

Life

“"You sound as if you question the authority and the decision of the Oracle, who said he should die."
"I do not. Why should I? But the Oracle did not ask me to carry out its decision." […]
"The Earth cannot punish me for obeying her mesenger," Okonkwo said. "A child's fingers are not scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm."”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 8 (p. 64)

Question , Decision

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 4 (p. 35)

Health , Heart , Season

“"Beware Okonkwo!" she warned. "Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!"”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 11 (p. 95)

God

“And when, as on that day, nine of the greatest masked spirits in the clan came out together it was a terrifying spectacle.
Okonkwo's wives, and perhaps other women as well, might have noticed that the second egwugwu had the springy walk of Okonkwo. And they might also have noticed that Okonkwo was not among the titled men and elders who sat behind the row of egwugwu. But if they thought these things they kept them to themselves. The egwugwu with the springy walk was one of the dead fathers of the clan.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 10 (p. 85)

Women , Men , Dead

“Okonkwo was popularly called the "Roaring Flame." As he looked into the log fire he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? […]
He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smoldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo's eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 17 (p. 143)

“You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. 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 the greatness in men.”

Chinua Achebe book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease (1960), Chapter 5 (p. 57)

Men , World , Tree

“Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden.”

Chinua Achebe book No Longer at Ease

Source: No Longer at Ease (1960), Chapter 5 (pp. 43–44)

Feeling , Quotes

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 118)

“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 book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 7 (p. 52)

Women , Children

“Let us give them a portion of the Evil Forest. They boast about victory over death. Let us give them a real battlefield in which to show their victory.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

[...] They offered them as much of the Evil Forest as they cared to take. And to their great amazement the missionaries thanked them and burst into song.
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 17 (p. 139)

Death , Evil , Victory

“We have heard stories about white men who make the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

[said Obierika]
"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. We have albinos among us. Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake, that they have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like them?"
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 15 (p. 130)

Drink , Strong , Sea , Making love

“Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 1

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