Best quotes from Chinua Achebe

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as the dominant figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the so called “African Trilogy”; later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). He is often referred to as the “father of African literature”, although he vigorously rejected the characterization. 

Achebe’s work has been extensively analyzed and a vast body of scholarly work discussing it has arisen. In addition to his seminal novels, Achebe’s oeuvre includes numerous short stories, poetry, essays and children’s books. His style relies heavily on the Igbo oral tradition, and combines straightforward narration with representations of folk stories, proverbs, and oratory. Among the many themes his works cover are culture and colonialism, masculinity and femininity, politics, and history.

Some of the best quotes from Chinua Achebe are listed below.

1. “A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.” – Chinua Achebe
2. “A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.” – Chinua Achebe
3. “A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.” – Chinua Achebe
4. “A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness.” – Chinua Achebe
5. “A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.” – Chinua Achebe
6. “Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.” – Chinua Achebe
7. “An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.” – Chinua Achebe
8. “An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.” – Chinua Achebe
9. “Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.” – Chinua Achebe
10. “As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.” – Chinua Achebe
11. “Charity is the opium of the privileged.” – Chinua Achebe
12. “Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.” – Chinua Achebe
13. “Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.” – Chinua Achebe
14. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
15. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
16. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
17. “I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.” – Chinua Achebe
18. “I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.” – Chinua Achebe
19. “I’m a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn’t want it.” – Chinua Achebe
20. “I’ve had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.” – Chinua Achebe
21. “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.” – Chinua Achebe
22. “In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.” – Chinua Achebe
23. “It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.” – Chinua Achebe
24. “It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.” – Chinua Achebe
25. “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
26. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
27. “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
28. “My weapon is literature.” – Chinua Achebe
29. “Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.” – Chinua Achebe
30. “Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.” – Chinua Achebe
31. “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
32. “Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.” – Chinua Achebe
33. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
34. “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” – Chinua Achebe
35. “People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.” – Chinua Achebe
36. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
37. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
38. “Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.” – Chinua Achebe
39. “Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.” – Chinua Achebe
40. “Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.” – Chinua Achebe
41. “Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.” – Chinua Achebe
42. “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
43. “That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.” – Chinua Achebe
44. “The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again.” – Chinua Achebe
45. “The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.” – Chinua Achebe
46. “The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave.” – Chinua Achebe
47. “The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.” – Chinua Achebe
48. “The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.” – Chinua Achebe
49. “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
50. “The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.” – Chinua Achebe
51. “The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!” – Chinua Achebe
52. “The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.” – Chinua Achebe
53. “The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them.” – Chinua Achebe
54. “The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity – that it’s this or maybe that – you have just one large statement; it is this.” – Chinua Achebe
55. “The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.” – Chinua Achebe
56. “The world is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.” – Chinua Achebe
57. “There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.” – Chinua Achebe
58. “There is no story that is not true.” – Chinua Achebe
59. “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
60. “They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.” – Chinua Achebe
61. “Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.” – Chinua Achebe
62. “To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.” – Chinua Achebe
63. “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” – Chinua Achebe
64. “What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens – whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.” – Chinua Achebe
65. “When a coward sees a man he can beat, he becomes hungry for a fight.” – Chinua Achebe
66. “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
67. “When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.” – Chinua Achebe
68. “When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.” – Chinua Achebe
69. “When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth.” – Chinua Achebe
70. “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
71. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
72. “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.” – Chinua Achebe
73. “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.” – Chinua Achebe
74. “While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.” – Chinua Achebe
75. “Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.” – Chinua Achebe
76. “Women and music should not be dated.” – Chinua Achebe
77. “Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches.” – Chinua Achebe