Chinua Achebe
novelist, poet, literary critic, essayist, writer, philosopher, university teacher
Read on Wikipedia1930 – 2013
All Quotes by 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.”
“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.”
“The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.”
“The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.”
“Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”
“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”
“The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”
“Proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You sound as if you question the authority and the decision of the Oracle, who said he should die." "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.”
“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.”
“Beware Okonkwo!" she warned. "Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!”
“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.”
“It was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.”
“When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.”
“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.”
“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.”
“"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.”
“The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.”
“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.”
“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.”
“As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”
“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.”
“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."”
“A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.”
“Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.”
“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.”
“A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.”
“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.”
“An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.”
“If one finger brings oil it soils the others.”
“Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.”
“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.”
“They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.”
“When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.”
“But 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.”
“Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.”
“I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.”
“Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.”
“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.”
“Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.”
“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.”
“The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.”
“I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.”
“The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.”
“The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.”
“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”
“Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”
“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.”
“Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.”
“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.”
“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!”
“Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.”
“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.”
“When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.”
“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.”
“Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I don't care about age very much.”
“Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.”
“Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I don't care about age very much.”
“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!”
“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.”