Quotes from Chinua Achebe

We shall 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 eagle perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.

Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death.

Children left their old parents at home and scattered in all directions in search of money. It was hard on an old woman with eight children. It was like having a river and yet washing one's hands with spittle.

The inquisitive monkey gets a bullet in the face.

Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.

stories. One of them went regularly to a market in the neighboring village and helped himself to whatever he liked. He went in full uniform, breaking the earth with his boots, and no one dared touch him. It was said that if you touched a soldier, Government

What a man does not know is greater than he.

But in dealing with a man who thinks you a fool it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.

A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with everyday herbs.

We have a saying that a snake is never as long as the stick to which we liken its length.

Our people say that if you thank a man for what he has done he will have strength to do more.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

The dispossession that caused my shrillness is in retreat though the marks of its pillage are still everywhere. I can see, in spite of them, that I have come a long way.

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 greatness in men.

If my enemy speaks the truth I will not say because it is spoken by my enemy I will not listen.

The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and re-generation that must be done. In fact, he should march right in front.

In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest - without asking to be paid.

But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also.

No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.

Letters are, of course, quite special in my view, for when a reader has been sufficiently moved (or even perturbed) by a book to sit down and compose a letter to the author, something very powerful has happened. Things Fall Apart has brought me a large body of such correspondence from people of different ages and backgrounds and from all the continents.

whether we look at one human family or we look at human society in general, growth can come only incrementally.

Living fire begets cold, impotent ash

Okonkwo was ruled by one passion -- to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

I wouldn't put myself under the democratic dictatorship even of angels and archangels.