CHINUA ACHEBE QUOTES IV

Nigerian writer (1930-2013)


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/a/includes/quoter.php on line 25

What really worries me is that those who are in positions of power are not really affected by what we are writing. In the moral dialogue you want to start, you really want to involve the leaders. People ask me: "Why were you so bold as to publish A Man of the People? How did you think the Government was going to take it? You didn't know there was going to be a coup?" I said rather flippantly that nobody was going to read it anyway, so I wasn't likely to be fired from my official position. It's a distressing thought that we cannot engage our leaders in the kind of moral debate we need.

CHINUA ACHEBE
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/a/includes/quoter.php on line 35

interview, Sunday Nation, Jan. 15, 1967


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/a/includes/quoter.php on line 61

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


If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

CHINUA ACHEBE

No Longer at Ease


We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: language, words


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


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


She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.

CHINUA ACHEBE

"Misunderstanding", Collected Poems

Tags: lips


Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Collected Poems

Tags: death


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!


Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Arrow of God

Tags: music, dance


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


The reality of today, different as it is from the reality of my society one hundred years ago, is and can be important if we have the energy and the inclination to challenge it, to go out and engage with its peculiarities, with the things that we do not understand. The real danger is the tendency to retreat into the obvious, the tendency to be frightened by the richness of the world and to clutch what we always have understood.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Tags: reality


A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.

CHINUA ACHEBE

No Longer at Ease

Tags: debt


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

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: talent


Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!

CHINUA ACHEBE

Attento, Soul Brother!

Tags: love


Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: charity


This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.

CHINUA ACHEBE

interview, Afrique, 1962


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

CHINUA ACHEBE

Attento, Soul Brother!

Tags: providence


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.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: writing


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