Nigerian writer (1930-2013)
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Afrique, 1962
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Education of a British-Protected Child
She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.
CHINUA ACHEBE
"Misunderstanding", Collected Poems
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 2, 2008
I was brought up in a village where the old ways were still active and alive, so I could see the remains of our tradition actually operating. At the same time I brought a certain amount of detachment to it too, because my father was a Christian missionary, and we were not fully part of the "heathen" life of the village. It was divided into the people of the Church and the people of the "world." I think it was easier for me to observe. Many of my contemporaries who went to school with me and came from heathen families ask me today: "How did you manage to know all these things?" You see, for them these old ways were just part of life. I could look at them from a certain distance, and I was struck by them.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Sunday Nation, Jan. 15, 1967
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Okike, 1990
Until Obi met Clara on board the cargo boat Sasa he had thought of love as another grossly over-rated European invention.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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...
CHINUA ACHEBE
"A Mother in a Refugee Camp", Collected Poems
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conjunctions, Fall 1991
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
interview, Afrique, 1962
A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease