Chinua Achebe: Man

“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

Learning , Change

“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

“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)

People

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

God , People , Error

“"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

“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