Nigerian Author Quotes

Chinua Achebe

Wole Soyinka

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chris Abani

Amos Tutuola

Flora Nwapa

Helon Habila

Sometimes you have to take a hard decision and when you take such decision, you have to stand by it. It's not everybody who sees what you are seeing.

There was a positive side to not trying at something: you could always pretend that your life would have been different if you had.

The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place.

You must take a year off, one of these days, before you're old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you'll see the world in a different way.

You want a husband who has time to ask you if you wish to eat rice, or drink corn pap with honey? Forget it. Men here are too busy being white men's servants to be men. We women mind the home. Not our husbands. Their manhood has been taken away from them The shame of it is that they don't know it. All they see is the money, shining white man's money.

What arrogance, what stupidity led us to this desolation, to this madness, to this wickedness, to this war, to this death? When this cruel war was over, there will be no more war. It will not happen again, never again. NEVER AGAIN, never again.

I was a palm-wine drunkard since I was a boy of ten years of age. I had no other work more than to drink palm-wine in my life. In those days we did not know other money except COWRIES, so that everything was very cheap, and my father was the richest man in our town.

How we danced. The music poured through our veins and we flowed with the beat. The wheel had come full circle. We wound and unwound our bodies seamlessly as if we had no bones. Is there a sight more beautiful, the older women said, than a Yoruba girl dancing?

Trouble me no further. The fooleries of beings whom I have fashioned closer to me weary and distress me. Yet I must persist, knowing that nothing is ever altered. My secret is my eternal burden —to pierce the encrustations of soul-deadening habit, and bare the mirror of original nakedness— knowing full well, it is all futility.

Puberty is the cradle of love, senility its cremation.

People don't fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it's too much.

Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Before you, mother Idoto,
naked I stand;
before your watery presence,
a prodigal.

Christopher Okigbo