Chinua Achebe Quotes
43 sayings by Chinua Achebe — 43 quotes.
2 of these 43 are cited to a published source.
- 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 literature is really performing its wonders.Quote · Nigeria
- 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.Quote · Nigeria
- Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.Quote · Nigeria
- People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.Quote · Nigeria
- Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.Quote · Nigeria
- Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.Quote · Nigeria
- 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.Quote · Nigeria
- Many writers can't make a living. So to be able to teach how to write is valuable to them. But I don't really know about its value to the student. I don't mean it's useless. But I wouldn't have wanted anyone to teach me how to write.Quote · Nigeria
- The whole idea of a 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.Quote · Nigeria
- I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.Quote · Nigeria
- They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.Quote · Nigeria
- When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.Quote · Nigeria
- One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.Quote · Nigeria
- I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.Quote · Nigeria
- In fact, I thought that Christianity was a 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.Quote · Nigeria
- When a handshake goes beyond the elbow, we know it has turned to another thing.Quote · Nigeria
- 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.Quote · Nigeria
- When the British came to Igboland, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.Quote · Nigeria
- If you don't like someone's story, write your own.Quote · Nigeria