Chinua Achebe Quotes

Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ Chinua Achebe

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

Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.

~ 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

In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest - without asking to be paid.

~ 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

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ Chinua Achebe

When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ 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

A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.

~ Chinua Achebe

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ 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

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

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 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

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.

~ 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

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor. For me, at least, I can declare that when I wrote THINGS FALL APART I couldn't have told anyone the day before it was accepted for publication that anybody was going to read it. There was no guarantee; nobody ever said to me, Go and write this, we will publish it and we will read it; it was just there. But my brother-in-law who was not a particularly voracious reader, told me that he read the novel through the night and it gave him a terrible headache the next morning. And I took that as an encouraging endorsement!The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures and situations.

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ Chinua Achebe

...she was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.

~ Chinua Achebe

Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

~ Chinua Achebe

The foreign correspondent is frequently the only means of getting an important story told, or of drawing the world's attention to disasters in the making or being covered up. Such an important role is risky in more ways than one. It can expose the correspondent to actual physical danger; but there is also the moral danger of indulging in sensationalism and dehumanizing the sufferer. This danger immediately raises the question of the character and attitude of the correspondent, because the same qualities of mind which in the past separated a Conrad from a Livingstone, or a Gainsborough from the anonymous painter of Francis Williams, are still present and active in the world today. Perhaps this difference can best be put in one phrase: the presence or absence of respect for the human person.

~ 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

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

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

~ Chinua Achebe

I don't care about age very much.

~ 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

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

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.

~ 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

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

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ Chinua Achebe

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

~ Chinua Achebe

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.

~ 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