Quotes from Chinua Achebe

An angry man is always a stupid man.

We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.

As a rule I don't like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.

An angry man is always a stupid man.

I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

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

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

To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!

Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

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

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.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.

She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.

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.

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

I have so many ideas; there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know; one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.

The eye is not harmed by sleep.

Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.