A collection of quotes and thoughts by Chinua Achebe on lion, world, sibling, world, things-fall-apart, proverbs, integrity, tradition, slavery, literature, suffering and words.
Chinua Achebe was an eminent Nigerian poet, critic, professor and novelist. He shot to fame with his first novel titled, ‘Things Fall Apart’, which is still widely read and is the most sought after book in modern African literature. In 2007, he won the ‘Man Booker International Prize’. He was an excellent student and earned a scholarship to study medicine, but he swapped medicine with English literature at the university. Some of his well-known works include, ‘A Man of The People’, ‘No Longer At Ease’, ‘Anthills Of The Savannah’ and ‘Arrow Of God’. We have compiled some well-known and quotable quotes and sayings by one of Africa’s foremost novelists which he expressed through his writings, poetry, novels, books, thoughts, lectures, essays, short-stories, folk stories and life. Read through the collection of thoughts and quotations by Chinua Achebe that will give you a glimpse of Igbo society, clash of western and traditional African values and the effect of Christian influences.
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
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
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
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.
At the most one could say that his chi or ... personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed.
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.
That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.
Chinua Achebe
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
Chinua Achebe
Procrastination is a lazy man's apology.
Chinua Achebe
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
Chinua Achebe
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.
Chinua Achebe
Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.
Chinua Achebe
Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.
Chinua Achebe
When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth
Chinua Achebe
He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days..
Chinua Achebe
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
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.
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.
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.
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
The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them.
Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death.
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.
 he was not really a man. )
