Chinua Achebe Quotes- 100 Quotes From The Legendary Nigerian Writer

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian author, poet and critic. He is referred to as a very important figure head in modern African literature.

His chef-d’oeuvre titled ‘Things Fall Apart which was first published in 1958 is widely read, studied and taught World Wide. He also has a lot of notable pieces of art which resonates with most Africa literature and is widely accepted, pieces like ‘No Longer at Ease’, Arrow of God’, and ‘A Man of the People’, amongst others.

His pieces are written in such a way that it tries to be devoid of the colonial history most Africa countries carry and live with while showcasing the beauty and ills of some African cultures, belief, traditions, and peoples.

Chinua Achebe creates magic and writes uniquely, drawing inspirations from Igbo culture which provides the base for storytelling, Christianity, and the western/African ‘relationship’.

Who Is Chinua Achebe?

Chinua Achebe was born and named Chinualumogu Achebe to the family of Isaiah Okafor Achebe who was a teacher and evangelist and Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam who was a vegetable farmer and daughter of a Blacksmith and also a women leader in Church.

He was born on the 16^th of November 1930 in Saint Simon’s Church, Nneobi. By 1936, he started school at St. Philips’ Central School, Akpakaogwe, Ogidi. He was in the religious class for young children till his intelligence couldn’t be ignored for much longer and the school’s chaplain had to promote him to a higher class.

By 1942, Chinua Achebe wrote entrance examinations and passed the exams for two colleges. He then enrolled in Nekede Central School, Owerri. After college, Chinua got into the first university which opened in Nigeria after Independence. The University was first called ‘University College’ but is known as the University of Ibadan in recent times.

Chinua was admitted into the University as a Major Scholar in the University’s first intake and given the scholarship to study Medicine. It was during this study in Ibadan that Chinua to critic European stories about Africa and Africans. The annoyance most literature his read about his people from the Europeans made him abandon Medicine and switch to English, History, and Theology.

He lost his bursary due to the switch and had to start paying tuition fees which were aided by scholarships from the government and his family members.

Chinua graduated from the University in 1953 with a second class degree and returned to his hometown where he began his quest towards beginning his professional career.

Chinua Achebe died on the 21^st of March 2013 at the age of 82 after years of giving Nigerians and indeed the whole of Africa a new perspective and changed a lot of narrative about Africa as well as winning him awards and Nobel Prizes.

Here Are Some Quotes From The Legendary Nigerian Writer

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.
The World is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
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.
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.
There is no story that is not true, The World has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
To me, being an intellectual doesn’t mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.
Charity is the opium of the privileged.
My weapon is literature
When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch! If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’ But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.
When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
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.
People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
When we are comforted and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
Whatever music you beat your drum to there is somebody who can dance to it.
Mosquito asked ear to marry him, whereupon ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. “How much longer do you think you’ll live?” she asked. “You are already a skeleton.” Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told ear he was still alive.
The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.
The whole idea of stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity- that it’s this or maybe that – you have just one large statement; it is this.
The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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.
Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.
Writers don’t give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
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.
It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.
A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.
In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.
People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle that is the time to do something about it, not when it’s around your neck.
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Ibo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb ‘Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya’; ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down’.
Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the thing that held us together and we have fallen apart.
A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.
“You don’t know me”, said Tortoise. “I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself”.
The world has no end and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness.
There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.
The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
Nothing puzzles God.
At the most, one could say that his chi or… personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed.
Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and providence to perform.
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
Become familiar with your home but know also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.
If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.
I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell a story in one way and say, ‘this is it’. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing. This is the way I think the world’s stories should be told: from many different perspectives.
When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not him.
One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.
When an old man dies, a library is burned to the ground.
Just think of the work you’ve set yourself to do, and do it as well as you can.
When brothers fight to death, a stranger inherits their father’s estate.
If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group, it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own experience.
For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well.
Women and music should not be dated.
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.
An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.
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.
A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.
Those whose kernels were cracked by benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.
Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.
I don’t care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
When old people speak, it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.
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 color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literatureis really performing its wonders.
In fact, I thought that Christianity was very good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn’t perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Once you allow yourself to identify with 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 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.
An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
In my definition I am a protest writer with restraint.
That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.
When mother cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth.
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.
The clock is ticking
No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.
Stories are not always innocent, they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.
He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing bust ashes of bygone days.
As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.
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.
The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them.
The air which had been stretched taut with excitement again.
To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.
The fly that no one advise it, follows the corpse into the grave.
I am that fire-that-burns-without-faggots.
Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father.
He who brings kola brings life.
“I don’t know how to thank you.” “ I can tell you” said Obierika. “Kill one of your sons for me.” “That will not be enough” said Ononkwo. “Then kill yourself.” Said Obierika.
Wisdom is like a goatskin bag, every man carries his own.
Villages that their leader came together to save themselves.
At the end of the thirty-month war, Biafra was a vast, smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population.
‘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.
Democracy is not something you put away for ten years and then in the 11^th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey through the world.
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Whoever 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.
Each of my books is different. Deliberately… I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
It’s true that a child belongs to its father but when a father bets his child, it seeks sympathy in its mothers’ hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. but when there is sorrow and bitterness, he finds refuge in his motherland. Your mother is there to protect you. She is buried there and that is why we say that mother is supreme.