Top 308 Quotes & Sayings by Chinua Achebe - Page 3

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe.
Last updated on November 5, 2024.
You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.
It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.
When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth — © Chinua Achebe
When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth
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.
Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too – If one says no to the other, let his wing break.
Women and music should not be dated.
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.
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.
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.
My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gathered
An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb
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.
Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own. — © Chinua Achebe
Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.
Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities
What a man does not know is greater than he.
I grew up recognizing that there was nobody to give me any advice and that you do your best and if it's not good enough, someday you will come to terms with that.
We live in a society that is in transition from oral to written. There are oral stories that are still there, not exactly in their full magnificence, but still strong in their differentness from written stories. Each mode has its ways and methods and rules. They can reinforce each other; this is the advantage my generation has - we can bring to the written story something of that energy of the story told by word of mouth.
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.
When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
When I'm writing, I really want to satisfy myself. I've got a story that I am working on and struggling with, and I want to tell it the most effective way I can. That's really what I struggle with. And the thought of who may be reading it may be there somewhere in the back of my mind - I'll never say it's not there because I don't know - but it's not really what I'm thinking about.
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.
No man however great is greater than his people
I try as hard as possible not to be pessimistic because I have never thought or believed that creating a Nigerian nation would be easy; I have always known that it was going to be a very tough job. But I never really thought that it would be this tough. And what's going on now, which is a subjection of this potentially great country to a clique of military adventurers and a political class that they have completely corrupted - this is really quite appalling. The suffering that they have unleashed on millions of people is quite intolerable.
We don't want to be simply wandering about without some kind of reason, we want our presence here to have a purpose, and that we are not going to end here, we are going to proceed somewhere else, and also that we didn't begin here, that we began somewhere else and all that living, all that elaborate account of our presence seems to be quite basic to our nature and so this is what literacy taps into.
For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.
One reason why I am quite angry with what is happening in Nigeria today is that everything has collapsed. If I decide to go back now, there will be so many problems - where will I find the physical therapy and other things that I now require?
You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.
The ordinary Nigerians have lived as neighbors down the millennia. I was talking about the British who came and merged a whole number of mini states and big states into one unit. But those people were always there, and they always managed to live side by side with their neighbours. So they were not owned or run by one kingdom. It was not practically impossible for these people when they have different languages and religions to be neighbors. So it is that habit of neighbourliness which is destroyed and put under great strain again and again when you have things like massacres.
When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.
Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.
The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world. — © Chinua Achebe
The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.
If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.
Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree — the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.
There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture - that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in.
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.
The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
I did not think of writing as a career and I don't think that I did this ever really, but I think of writing as something that I could do, I should do alongside whatever else I was doing. It simply grew on me.
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.
My weapon is literature — © Chinua Achebe
My weapon is literature
It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.
Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.
There is something about important stories that is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language. So it's really a balance between your commitment, whether it's political or economic or whatever, and your craft as an artist.
There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
I couldn't tell you why but now I know a story is in fact where you discover who you are, where a culture discovers what it is and I just think that this is a terribly important place to get into and that I would enjoy it.
A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.
In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.
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.
I don't want to be the one to tell somebody, You will not make it, even though I know that the majority of those who come to me with their manuscripts are not really good enough.
I think as you grow up and you see things which are around you and you ask questions and you hear the answers, your situation becomes more and more of a puzzle. Now, why is it like this, why are things like this and since writing is one way in which one can ask this questions and try to find these answers, it seems to me a very natural thing to do, especially as it meant stories which I always found moving, almost unbearably necessary.
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
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