Chinua Achebe Quotes

122 Sourced Quotes

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

Chinua Achebe
It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

Chinua Achebe
The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a resonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

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

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

Chinua Achebe
If you had been poor in your last life I would have asked you to be rich when you come again. But you were rich. If you had been a coward, I would have asked you to bring courage. But you were a fearless warrior. If you had died young, I would have asked you to get life. But you lived long. So I shall ask you to come again the way you came before.

Chinua Achebe
We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

Chinua Achebe
This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.

Chinua Achebe
And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

Chinua Achebe
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.

Chinua Achebe
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!

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.

Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.

Chinua Achebe
We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.

Chinua Achebe
I don't lay down the law for anybody else. But I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.... Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.

Chinua Achebe
Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities

Chinua Achebe
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

Chinua Achebe
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
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.

Chinua Achebe
The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.

Chinua Achebe
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.

Chinua Achebe
The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

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

Chinua Achebe
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.

Chinua Achebe
In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

Chinua Achebe
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.

Chinua Achebe
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

Chinua Achebe
The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.

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

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

Chinua Achebe