Chinua Achebe Quotes

Nobody can teach me who I am.

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 colour, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

A man who asks questions does not lose his way; that is what our fathers taught us.

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

When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

We did not ask him for money yesterday; we shall not ask him tomorrow. But today is our day; we have climbed the iroko tree and would be foolish not to take down all the firewood we need.

Measure out / [their] joys and agonies / too, our long, long passion week / in paces of the dance”

Well there is an assumption there that Conrad's...Heart of Darkness is great art and I don't accept that. Great art flourishes on problems or anguish or prejudice. But the role of the writer must be very clear. The writer must not be on the side of oppression. In other words there must be no confusion. I write about prejudice; I write about wickedness; I write about murder, I write about rape: but I must not be caught on the side of murder or rape. It is as simple as that.

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.

villages that their leaders came together to save themselves.

Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth.

There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up.

Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.