CHINUA ACHEBE QUOTES IV

Nigerian writer (1930-2013)

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


The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: power


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


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


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


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!


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


He who fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime.

CHINUA ACHEBE

No Longer at Ease


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


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


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


What is modesty but inverted pride?

CHINUA ACHEBE

A Man of the People

Tags: modesty, pride


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


Despite the daunting problems of identity that beset our contemporary society, we can see in the horizon the beginnings of a new relationship between artist and community which will not flourish like the mango-trick in the twinkling of an eye but will rather, in the hard and bitter manner of David Diop's young tree, grow patiently and obstinately to the ultimate victory of liberty and fruition.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: artists


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


Come here into the hollow of my conscience
I will show you a thing or two
I will show you the heat of my love.
You know what?
I can give you babies too
Real leaders of tomorrow
Right here under the bridge
I can give you real leaders of thought.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?

CHINUA ACHEBE

Arrow of God

Tags: instinct


[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


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

CHINUA ACHEBE

Arrow of God

Tags: music, dance


The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Tags: writing, literature