Top 200 Chinua Achebe Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Many writers can’t make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don’t really know about its value to the student. I don’t mean it’s useless. But I wouldn’t have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.”

— Chinua Achebe

202. “An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.”

— Chinua Achebe

203. “Our humanity is contingent on the humanity of our fellows. No person or group can be human alone. We rise above the animal together, or not at all. If we learned that lesson even this late in the day, we would have taken a truly millennial step forward.”

— Chinua Achebe

204. “The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it’s a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.”

— Chinua Achebe

205. “I’m a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn’t want it.”

— Chinua Achebe

206. “Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That’s not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.”

— Chinua Achebe

207. “Africa is people” may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.”

— Chinua Achebe

208. “What kind of power was it if it would never be used?”

— Chinua Achebe

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

— Chinua Achebe

210. “Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.”

— Chinua Achebe

211. “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.”

— Chinua Achebe

212. “Africa never spared those who did what they liked instead of what they had to do.”

— Chinua Achebe

213. “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.”

— Chinua Achebe

214. “I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they build cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety.”

— Chinua Achebe

215. “When you have paid a hundred and thirty pounds bride-price and you are only a second-class clerk, you find you haven’t got any more to spare on other women.”

— Chinua Achebe

216. “Children left their old parents at home and scattered in all directions in search of money. It was hard on an old woman with eight children. It was like having a river and yet washing one’s hands with spittle.”

— Chinua Achebe

217. “That we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking.”

— Chinua Achebe

218. “His mind, never content with shallow satisfactions, crept to the brink of knowing. What kind of power was it if it would never be used?”

— Chinua Achebe

219. “As the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth-living.”

— Chinua Achebe

220. “There is no story that is not true,” said Uchendu. “The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”

— Chinua Achebe

221. “Okonkwo was ruled by one passion – to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.”

— Chinua Achebe

222. “But it was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.”

— Chinua Achebe

223. “Our people say that if you thank a man for what he has done he will have strength to do more.”

— Chinua Achebe

224. “But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also.”

— Chinua Achebe

225. “We have a saying that a snake is never as long as the stick to which we liken its length.”

— Chinua Achebe

226. “And immediately Okonkwo’s eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply.”

— Chinua Achebe

227. “I felt so bad I did not need any further comfort for myself.”

— Chinua Achebe

228. “As she stood gazing at the circular darkness which has swallowed them, tears gushed from her eyes, and she swore within her that if she heard Ezinma cry she would rush into the cave to defend her against all the gods in the world. She would die with her.”

— Chinua Achebe

229. “How can a man who has killed five men in a battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their family number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed.”

— Chinua Achebe

230. “The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us.”

— Chinua Achebe

231. “Who ever planted an iroko tree – the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with greatness in men.”

— Chinua Achebe

232. “Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.”

— Chinua Achebe