Top 200 Chinua Achebe Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.”

— Chinua Achebe

152. “I have so many ideas; there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know; one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you’re almost confused, because you don’t know where to begin.”

— Chinua Achebe

153. “The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don’t always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!”

— Chinua Achebe

154. “My son even if you want to fall, at least fall where your bones can be gathered.”

— Chinua Achebe

155. “The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.”

— Chinua Achebe

156. “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.”

— Chinua Achebe

157. “Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance.”

— Chinua Achebe

158. “What a man does not know is greater than he.”

— Chinua Achebe

159. “One would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.”

— Chinua Achebe

160. “Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it’s far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do – it can make us identify with situations and people far away.”

— Chinua Achebe

161. “Igbo sayings and proverbs are far more valuable to me as a human being in understanding the complexity of the world than the doctrinaire, self-righteous strain of the Christian faith I was taught.”

— Chinua Achebe

162. “Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.”

— Chinua Achebe

163. “Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.”

— Chinua Achebe

164. “Praise bounteous providence if you will that grants even an ogre a tiny glow-worm tenderness encapsulated in icy caverns of a cruel heart or else despair for in the very germ of that kindred love is lodged the perpetuity of evil.”

— Chinua Achebe

165. “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.”

— Chinua Achebe

166. “The writer is often faced with two choices – turn away from the reality of life’s intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.”

— Chinua Achebe

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

— Chinua Achebe

168. “Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.”

— Chinua Achebe

169. “People are wrong when they tell you that Conrad was on the side of Africans because his story showed great compassion towards them. Africans are not really served by his compassion, whatever it means; they ask for one thing alone – to be seen for what they are: human beings. Conrad pulls back from granting them this favour in Heart of Darkness.”

— Chinua Achebe

170. “They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.”

— Chinua Achebe

171. “You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.”

— Chinua Achebe

172. “There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge – the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc. – on a scale none of us had ever witnessed.”

— Chinua Achebe

173. “If my enemy speaks the truth I will not say because it is spoken by my enemy I will not listen.”

— Chinua Achebe

174. “In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.”

— Chinua Achebe

175. “And now the rains had really come, so heavy and persistent that 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. The personal dynamism required to counter the forces of these extremes of weather would be far too great for the human frame.”

— Chinua Achebe

176. “Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room. There is this complexity which seems to me to be part of the meaning of existence and everything we value.”

— Chinua Achebe

177. “The emperor would prefer the poet to keep away from politics, the emperor’s domain, so that he can manage things the way he likes.”

— Chinua Achebe

178. “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.”

— Chinua Achebe

179. “The poor of the world may be guilty of this and that particular fault or foolishness, but if we are fair we will admit that nothing they have done or left undone quite explains all the odds we see stacked up against them. We are sometimes tempted to look upon the poor as so many ne’er-do-wells we can simply ignore. But they will return to haunt our peace, because they are greater than their badge of suffering, because they are human.”

— Chinua Achebe

180. “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

181. “Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.”

— Chinua Achebe

182. “I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.”

— Chinua Achebe

183. “Ghana was a particularly relevant example for us subjects in the remaining colonies and dominions of the British Empire. There was a growing confidence, not just a feeling, that we would do just as well parting ways with Her Majesty’s empire. If Ghana seemed more effective, as some of our people like to say, perhaps it was because she was smaller in size and neat, as if it was tied together more delicately by well-groomed, expert hands.”

— Chinua Achebe

184. “But let the slave who sees another cast into a shallow grave know that he will be buried in the same way when his day comes.”

— Chinua Achebe

185. “The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.”

— Chinua Achebe

186. “Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.”

— Chinua Achebe

187. “My people have a saying which my father often used. A man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof.”

— Chinua Achebe

188. “There’s no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.”

— Chinua Achebe

189. “I don’t care about age very much.”

— Chinua Achebe

190. “When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.”

— Chinua Achebe

191. “I think writers are not only writers, they are also citizens.”

— Chinua Achebe

192. “Ghana and Nigeria resented each other and competed for supremacy in every sphere – politics, academia, sports, you name it.”

— Chinua Achebe

193. “I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That’s different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.”

— Chinua Achebe

194. “There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that a Biafran plane landed in another African country, and the pilot and all of the crew came out, and there was not a white man among them. The people of this other country – which is a stooge of France – couldn’t comprehend a plane being landed without any white people. They said, “Where is the pilot? Where are the white people?” They arrested the crew, presuming there had been a rebellion in the air!”

— Chinua Achebe

195. “Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”

— Chinua Achebe

196. “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.”

— Chinua Achebe

197. “I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.”

— Chinua Achebe

198. “Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.”

— Chinua Achebe

199. “If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?”

— Chinua Achebe

200. “My father used to say that it is the fear of causing offense that makes men swallow poison.”

— Chinua Achebe