Chinua Achebe quotes:

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  • One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.

  • 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.

  • An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.

  • 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.

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

  • Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.

  • 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.

  • It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns 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 put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

  • Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves

  • The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

  • 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 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.

  • Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.

  • 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.

  • I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

  • [Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?

  • I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

  • 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.

  • The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.

  • Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. H. P. LOVECRAFT, attributed, Telling It Like It Is Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.

  • You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.

  • The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

  • 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.

  • A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • An angry man is always a stupid man.

  • Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.

  • After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.

  • Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Nobody can teach me who I am.

  • You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

  • If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

  • If you don't like someone's story, write your own. If you don't like what somebody says, say what it is you don't like.

  • When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

  • 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.

  • People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

  • An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

  • 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.

  • We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: 'He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.'

  • Mosquito [...] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.

  • Become familiar with your home, but know also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.

  • When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their fatherâ??s estate

  • Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see.

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

  • We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

  • There is no story that is not true.

  • 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.

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

  • What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.

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

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

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

  • When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

  • The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

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

  • There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail - the bravery, even, of the lions.

  • 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.

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

  • One reason why I am quite angry with what is happening in Nigeria today is that everything has collapsed. If I decide to go back now, there will be so many problems - where will I find the physical therapy and other things that I now require? Will the doctors, who are leaving in droves, coming to America, going to everywhere in the world - Saudi Arabia - how many of them will be there? The universities have almost completely lost their faculties and are hardly ever in session, shut down for one reason or another.

  • When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.

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

  • Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.

  • No man however great is greater than his people

  • It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.

  • Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

  • People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. Its not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people dont do what common sense demands.

  • Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle...

  • People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

  • 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.

  • When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.

  • In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

  • A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.

  • 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.

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