Chinua Achebe Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
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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.
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When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.
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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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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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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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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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'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 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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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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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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A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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If one finger brings oil it soils the others.
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A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
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The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.