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Chinua Achebe Quotes

Total quotes: 62
“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, Celebrating Chinua Achebe: Essays on His Life, Legacy and Works
Tagged: Self-awareness
“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, There Was a Country: A Memoir
Tagged: Universalism, humanity
“He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Cultural Annihilation, Knives
“For whom is it well, for whom is it well?

There is no one for whom it is well.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Pessimism, Nihilism, Black PIll
“‘Looking at a king's mouth,’ said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.’”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: kings, Monarchs, breastfeeding
“When you have paid a hundred and thirty pounds bride-price and you are only a second-class clerk, you find you haven’t got any more to spare on other women.”
— Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart; Arrow of God; No Longer at Ease(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: Dowry, Working Class
“The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and re-generation that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.”
— Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Tagged: Writers, Reeducation, Marching, Social Activism
“At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population.”
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: Biafra, War, Smoldering, Rubble
“A person who has not secured a place on the floor should not begin to look for a mat.”
— Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
Tagged: Planning, preparation
“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, A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe(1989-01-19)
Tagged: Murder, Vigilantism
“Igbo sayings and proverbs are far more valuable to me as a human being in understanding the complexity of the world than the doctrinaire, self-righteous strain of the Christian faith I was taught.”
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: Igbo, sayings, Proverbs, Christian, self-righteous
“We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.”
— Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart; Arrow of God; No Longer at Ease(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: Pacifism, Threats
“There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Umuofia, Dancing, Drums
“Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Worth, Family, Inheritance
“I have learnt that a man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Person, trouble, troublesome, inviting trouble, Life
“The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Eternity, Moral Relativity
“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, No Longer at Ease
Tagged: impatient, Idealist, Realism
“He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Ancestors, Elders, Sacrifice, worship, Bygone
“A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: snake, Fear, Dishonesty
“She believed because it was that faith alone that gave her own life any kind of meaning.”
— Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart; Arrow of God; No Longer at Ease(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
Tagged: Belief, Faith, Meaning
“In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria’s blockade policies.”
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: Starvation, Nigeria, Blockade
“Even when there was strong disagreement, one had to remember to be discordant with respect.”
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: Respectful Disagreement
“As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.”
— Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
Tagged: Suffering, purpose
“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.”
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
Tagged: Story, Blundering, Beggars
“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 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, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: written word, Culture, Awareness
“When mother-cow is chewing grass, its young ones watch its mouth.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Metaphor, Greed
“In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.”
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: protest, Writing, Restraint
“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, Home and Exile
Tagged: Absolute Power, Privilege, Totalitarian Regimes
“What kind of power was it if everybody knew that it would never be used? Better to say that it was not there, that it was no more than the power in the anus of the proud dog who tried to put out a furnace with his puny fart....He turned the yam with a stick.”
— Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
Tagged: Power, Anus, Fart
“Paradoxically, a saint like [Albert] Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother.”
— Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
Tagged: Albert Schweitzer, Missionaries, Paternalism, King Leopold II
“But knowing or not knowing does not save us from being known.”
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
Tagged: Knowing, Being Known
“Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.”
— Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God
Tagged: Wisdom, personal
“The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.”
— Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
Tagged: Language, Whipping Boy, Complexity, Politics
“With unparalleled rapidity, the Igbos advanced fastest in the shortest period of time of all Nigeria’s ethnic groups. Like the Jews, to whom they have frequently been likened, they progressed despite being a minority in the country, filling the ranks of the nation’s educated, prosperous upper classes.”
— Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
Tagged: Igbo, Nigeria, Ethnic Groups, Jews, prosperous, Upper Classes
“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Moonshine, Disabled
“Women and music should not be dated.”
— Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease
Tagged: Women, Music, Ageism
“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.”
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
Tagged: Radical Theory, disease, Contradictions
“Charity…is the opium of the privileged.”
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
Tagged: charity, Telescopic Philanthropy, Opium, privileged
“Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!”
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
Tagged: Writers, Prescriptions, headaches
“The world is large, said Okonkwo. I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.

That cannot be, said Machi. You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.”
— Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Tagged: Matriarchy, Patriarchy, Sexism, gender roles
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