Chinua Achebe quotes - page 2

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. (Chinua Achebe)
In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. [...] One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. View quote
Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo was popularly called the "Roaring Flame." As he looked into the log fire he recalled the name. He was a flaming fire. How then could he have begotten a son like Nwoye, degenerate and effeminate? [...] He sighed heavily, and as if in sympathy the smoldering log also sighed. And immediately Okonkwo's eyes were opened and he saw the whole matter clearly. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash. He sighed again, deeply. View quote
Chinua Achebe
There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. View quote
Chinua Achebe
Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am - and what I need - is something I have to find out myself. View quote
Chinua Achebe
People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck. View quote
Chinua Achebe
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged. View quote
Chinua Achebe
There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. View quote
Chinua Achebe
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity. View quote
Chinua Achebe
...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly. View quote
Chinua Achebe
While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary. (Chinua Achebe)
Nobody can teach me who I am. View quote
Chinua Achebe
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. View quote
Chinua Achebe
There is no story that is not true. View quote
Chinua Achebe
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. View quote
Chinua Achebe
A child cannot pay for its mother's milk. View quote
Chinua Achebe
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever. View quote
Chinua Achebe
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. View quote
Chinua Achebe
My weapon is literature. View quote
Chinua Achebe
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery. View quote
Chinua Achebe
You do not know me,' said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself. (Chinua Achebe)
Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. View quote
Chinua Achebe
We have heard stories about white men who make the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true. View quote
Chinua Achebe
It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair. View quote
Chinua Achebe
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb"He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down. View quote
Chinua Achebe