CHINUA ACHEBE QUOTES III

Nigerian writer (1930-2013)

Now I think I know why gods
Are so partial to heights--to mountain
Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees
And thorn-guarded holy bombax,
Why petty household divinities
Will sooner perch on a rude board
Strung precariously from brittle rafters
Of a thatched roof
than sit squarely
On safe earth.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Collected Poems

Tags: God


My theory of the uses of fiction is that benificent fiction calls into full life our total range of imaginative faculties and gives us a heightened sense of our personal, social and human reality.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: writing


But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: women


The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: women


Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: charity


You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. 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 the greatness in men.

CHINUA ACHEBE

No Longer at Ease


When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Things Fall Apart

Tags: moon


But oh what beauty! What speed!
A chariot of night in panic flight
From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites
Of day! And riding out Our procession
Of fantasy We slaked an ancient
Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy
Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries
Returned to rest on that puny
Legend of the life-jacket stowed away
Of all places under my seat.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Collected Poems


I flung open long-disused windows
and doors and saw my hut
new-swept by rainbow broom
of sunlight become my home again
on whose trysting floor waited
my proud vibrant life.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Attento, Soul Brother!


Fortunately, in real life, we are not in danger of these bizarre extremes unless we consciously work our way into them. I can see no situation in which I will be presented with a Draconic choice between reading books and watching movies; or between English and Igbo. For me, no either/or; I insist on both. Which, you might say, makes my life rather difficult and even a little untidy. But I prefer it that way.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Morning Yet on Creation Day

Tags: language


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

Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 2008

Tags: children, America


Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: Joseph Conrad, racism


She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.

CHINUA ACHEBE

"Misunderstanding", Collected Poems

Tags: lips


There are two streams in the minds of our people: one in which women are really oppressed and given very low status and one in which they are given very high honour, sometimes even greater honour than men, at least if not in fact, in language and metaphor.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Conversations with Chinua Achebe

Tags: women


[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?

CHINUA ACHEBE

A Man of the People

Tags: fortune


Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?

CHINUA ACHEBE

Arrow of God

Tags: instinct


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. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Tags: writing, artists


A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Things Fall Apart

Tags: failure, pride


The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Arrow of God

Tags: travel