Chinua Achebe Quotes

“Charity ... is the opium of the privileged.”

— Chinua Achebe

“There is no story that is not true.”

— Chinua Achebe

“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”

— Chinua Achebe

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

— Chinua Achebe

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.

— Chinua Achebe

“What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.”

— Chinua Achebe

“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.”

— Chinua Achebe

“When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.”

— Chinua Achebe

“Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.”

— Chinua Achebe

“It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.”

— Chinua Achebe

“A child cannot pay for its mother's milk.”

— Chinua Achebe

“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

“Mosquito [ ... ] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive.”

— Chinua Achebe

“Women and music should not be dated.”

— Chinua Achebe

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

— Chinua Achebe

“That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.”

— Chinua Achebe

“In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.”

— Chinua Achebe

“When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth”

— Chinua Achebe

“Africa is people may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.”

— Chinua Achebe

“Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.”

— Chinua Achebe

“A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing”

— Chinua Achebe

“She was sensitive enough and intelligent enough to understand, and her literary education could not but have sharpened her perception of the evidence before her eyes: that in the absurd raffle-draw that apportioned the destinies of post-colonial African societies two people starting off even as identical twins in the morning might quiet easily find themselves in the evening one as President shitting on the heads of the people and the other a nightman carrying the people's shit in buckets on his head.”

— Chinua Achebe

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

The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details s cutting a hanged man from a tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. The story of the man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter ob him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting 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

“Villages that their leaders came together to save themselves.”

— Chinua Achebe

I do not know how to thank you.'
'I can tell you,' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.'
'That will not be enough,' said Okonkwo.
'Then kill yourself,' said Obierika.

— Chinua Achebe

The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again.

— Chinua Achebe

“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

“Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!”

— Chinua Achebe

“My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.”

— Chinua Achebe

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.

— Chinua Achebe

Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.

— Chinua Achebe

“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.”

— Chinua Achebe

Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.

— Chinua Achebe

“People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them. This is what people have come to expect. Its not viewed as a serious continent. Its a place of strange, bizarre and illogical things, where people dont do what common sense demands.”

— Chinua Achebe

“As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.”

— Chinua Achebe

An angry man is always a stupid man.

— Chinua Achebe

“Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not.”

— Chinua Achebe

“A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.”

— Chinua Achebe

“When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father's estate”

— Chinua Achebe

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

— Chinua Achebe

“The writer is often faced with two choices
turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.”

— 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

“Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum ... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind ... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle ...”

— Chinua Achebe

“Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.”

— Chinua Achebe

“My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gathered”

— Chinua Achebe

“A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?”

— Chinua Achebe

“When a new saying gets to the land of empty men, they lose their heads over it.”

— Chinua Achebe

“The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.”

— Chinua Achebe

“What kind of power was it if it would never be used?”

— Chinua Achebe