Quotes from Chinua Achebe

Things are always like that. Our eye sees something; we take a stone and aim at it. But the stone rarely succeeds like the eye in hitting the mark.

In our custom a man is not expected to go down on his knees and knock his forehead on the ground to his wife to ask her forgiveness or beg a favor. But, a wise man knows that between him and his wife there may arise the need for him to say to her in secret: I beg you.

Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves.

A man might pick his way with the utmost care through a crowded market but find that the hem of his cloth had upset and broken another's wares; in such a case the man, not his cloth, was held to repair the damage.

anger against a kinsman was felt in the flesh, not in the marrow

The boy who persists in asking what happened to his father before he has enough strength to avenge him is asking for his father's fate...

Scepticism is a girl's number six

But knowing or not knowing does not save us from being known

It is significant, for example, that the moment when churchmen began to doubt the existence of the black man's soul was the same moment the black man's body was fetching high prices in the marketplace for their mercantilist cousins and parishioners.

With unparalleled rapidity, the Igbos advanced fastest in the shortest period of time of all Nigeria's ethnic groups. Like the Jews, to whom they have frequently been likened, they progressed despite being a minority in the country, filling the ranks of the nation's educated, prosperous upper classes.

Somehow I found myself admiring the man for his lack of modesty. For what is modesty but inverted pride? We all think we are first-class people. Modesty forbids us from saying so ourselves though, presumably, not from wanting to hear it from others. Perhaps it was their impatience with this kind of hypocrisy that made men like Nanga successful politicians while starry-eyed idealists strove vaingloriously to bring into politics niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere.

When was it ever heard that a child was scalded by the piece of yam its own mother put in its palm? What man would send his son with a potsherd to bring fire from a neighbor's hut and then unleash rain on him? Who ever sent his son up the palm to gather nuts and then took an axe and felled the tree?

Decolonising the Mind, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ng?g? wa Thiong'o.

And so Mr. Brown came to be respected even by the clan, because he trod softly on its faith.

In the end millions (some state upward of three million, mostly children) had died, mainly from starvation due to the federal government of Nigeria's blockade policies.

Whether the rendezvous of separate histories will take place in a grand, harmonious concourse or be fraught with bitterness and acrimony will all depend on whether we have learned to recognize one another's presence and are ready to accord human respect to every people.

We wrote about politics so you can write about daffodils

H]e developed a private philosophy of total self-reliance, an unyielding internal sufficiency that requires no external support from others.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. —W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming

Even when there was strong disagreement, one had to remember to be discordant with respect.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them dialects!

This was what British administration was doing among the Ibos, making a dozen mushroom kings grow where there was none before.

The change in her when it came was sudden.