Chinua Achebe Quotes

Our elders say that the sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.

He calls the ground where men return in death a place of “safety” and “strength” .

و بينما وقفت تحملق في الظلمة المستديرة التي ابتلعتهما, تساقطت الدموع بغزارة من عينيها, وأقسمت في داخلها أنها إذا سمعت ازنما تصرخ فستندفع إلى داخل الكهف لتدافع عنها ضد جميع آلهة العالم. لا بل تموت معها.

He warns them not to become “disinherited”.

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.

Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.

I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. 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.

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.

If you don't like someone's story, write your own.

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.

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

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

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

...stories are not always innocent;...they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.

Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden.