Chinua Achebe Quotes

The dispossession that caused my shrillness is in retreat though the marks of its pillage are still everywhere. I can see, in spite of them, that I have come a long way.

That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.

Have you not heard that when two brothers fight a stranger reaps the harvest?

The guilty suffers; the sufferer is guilty. As for the righteous, those whose arms are straight, they will always prosper!

What kind of power was it if everybody knew that it would never be used? Better to say that it was not there, that it was no more than the power in the anus of the proud dog who tried to put out a furnace with his puny fart.... He turned the yam with a stick.

To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.

The world is large,” said Okonkwo. “I have even heard that in some tribes a man’s children belong to his wife and her family.”

“That cannot be,” said Machi. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

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.

A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

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.

If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation--a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them.

To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.

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. The rest of the world is unaware of it.

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them