Chinua Achebe Quotes - Page 5

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

What a man does not know is greater than he.

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.

Colonial rule means that power, initiative is taken away from you by somebody else who makes your decisions. If that goes on long enough, beyond one generation, then the habit of self-rule is forgotten. People are no longer able to realize what it means. To be dependant for a hundred years! And suddenly when this thing ends there is nobody who actually knows how to set about running the country.

A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.

A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.

What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.

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

A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing

You must develop the habit of skepticism, not swallow every piece of superstition you are told by witch-doctors and professors.

Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too – If one says no to the other, let his wing break.

Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.

People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.

...Nothing puzzles God

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

I try as hard as possible not to be pessimistic because I have never thought or believed that creating a Nigerian nation would be easy; I have always known that it was going to be a very tough job. But I never really thought that it would be this tough. And what's going on now, which is a subjection of this potentially great country to a clique of military adventurers and a political class that they have completely corrupted - this is really quite appalling. The suffering that they have unleashed on millions of people is quite intolerable.

For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

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.

Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.

There is a certain increase in the importance I assign to women in getting us out of the mess that we are in, which is a reflection of the role of women in my traditional culture - that they do not interfere in politics until men really make such a mess that the society is unable to go backward or forward. Then women will move in.

The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.

If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.