Quotes from Chinua Achebe

A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.

But oh what beauty! What speed! A chariot of night in panic flight From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites Of day! And riding out Our procession Of fantasy We slaked an ancient Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries Returned to rest on that puny Legend of the life-jacket stowed away Of all places under my seat.

Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

In his long evolutionary history, man has scored few greater successes than his creation of human society. For it is on that primeval achievement that he has built those special qualities of mind and of behaviour which, in his own view at least, separate him from lower forms of life. If we sometimes tend to overlook this fact it is only because we have lived so long under the protective ambience of society that we have come to take its benefits for granted.

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.

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

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.

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!

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

No Madonna and Child could touch Her tenderness for a son She soon would have to forget.... The air was heavy with odors of diarrhea, Of unwashed children with washed-out ribs And dried-up bottoms waddling in labored steps Behind blown-empty bellies. Other mothers there Had long ceased to care, but not this one: She held a ghost-smile between her teeth, And in her eyes the memory Of a mother's pride...

Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities.

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.

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.

A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.

As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

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.

If one finger brings oil it soils the others.

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

I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my feet.

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.

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.

What is modesty but inverted pride?

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

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.