Quotes from Chinua Achebe

Es posible que en el fondo Okonkwo no fuera cruel. Pero toda su vida estaba dominada por el temor, el temor al fracaso y a la debilidad. Era algo más profundo y más íntimo que el temor a los dioses malignos y caprichosos y a la magia, que el temor a la selva y a las fuerzas de la naturaleza, malévolas, de dientes y garras rojos. Los temores de Okonkwo eran peores que todo eso. No eran externos, sino que yacían en lo más hondo de su ser.

We have a saying that a toad does not run in the day unless something is after it.

El mundo está cambiando ?le había dicho?. No me gusta, pero soy como el pájaro eneke-nti-oba, que cuando sus amigos le preguntaron por que volaba a todas horas respondió: Los hombres de hoy han aprendido a disparar sin errar y por eso yo he aprendido a volar sin posarme en las ramas.

Dicen nuestros mayores que el sol ha de alumbrar antes a los que están de pie que a los que se arrodillan bajo ellos.

A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.

Un corazón orgulloso puede sobrevivir a un fracaso general, porque ese fracaso no afecta a su orgullo.

Es cierto que los hijos pertenecen a los padres. Pero cuando un padre le pega a su hijo, éste busca consuelo en la cabaña de su madre. Un hombre pertenece al país de su padre cuando las cosas van bien y la vida es dulce: Pero cuando hay pena y amargura, encuentra refugio en la tierra de su madre. Tu madre está ahí para protegerte. Está enterrada ahí. Y por eso decimos que la madre es suprema.

The Igbo are a very democratic people. The Igbo people expressed a strong antimonarchy sentiment—Ezebuilo—which literally means, a king is an enemy.

What was missing in all of them, he thought, was a recognition of Africans as people with projects—lives they were leading, aspirations they were striving for—and a rich existing culture, exemplified in the proverbs and the religious traditions that are threaded through these novels. He was writing, as he often said, against the Africa of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Puisque j'ai survécu à cette année-là, disait-il toujours, je survivrai à n'importe quoi.

It is not bravery for a man to beat his wife. I know a man and his wife must quarrel; there is no abomination in that. Even brothers and sisters from the same womb disagree; how much more two strangers. No, you may quarrel, but let it not end in fighting.

A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi

She believed because it was that faith alone that gave her own life any kind of meaning.

That night the Mother of the Spirits walked the length and breadth of the clan, weeping for her murdered son. It was a terrible night. Not even the oldest man in Umuofia had ever heard such a strange and fearful sound, and it was never to be heard again. It seemed as if the very soul of the tribe wept for a great evil that was coming—its own death.

he that has health and children will also have wealth

In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm-wine, called round his neighbors and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a dead man's mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one's lifetime. Unoka was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbor some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts.

He forgot the saying of the elders that if a man sought for a companion who acted entirely like himself he would live in solitude.

And besides do not our people say that he is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger?

The time a man wakes up is his morning.

Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.

And by hearing all the stories we will find points of contact and communication, and the world story, the Great Story, will have a chance to develop. That's the only precaution I would suggest—that we not rush into announcing the arrival of this international, this great world story, based simply on our knowledge of one or a few traditions.

Did not our elders tell us that as soon as we shake hands with a leper he will want an embrace?

But the eye is very greedy and will steal a look at something its owner has no wish to see.

The young he-goat said that but his sojourn in his mother's clan he would not have learnt to stick up his upper lip.