Chinua Achebe Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.
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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.
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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.
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Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
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When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.
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'Beware Okonkwo!' she warned. 'Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!'
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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.
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'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.
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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.
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The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
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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.
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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.
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A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
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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.
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People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
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The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
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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.