Nigerian writer (1930-2013)
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
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Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
He who fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. 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 the greatness in men.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Fortunately, in real life, we are not in danger of these bizarre extremes unless we consciously work our way into them. I can see no situation in which I will be presented with a Draconic choice between reading books and watching movies; or between English and Igbo. For me, no either/or; I insist on both. Which, you might say, makes my life rather difficult and even a little untidy. But I prefer it that way.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Conversations with Chinua Achebe
Only half-wits can stumble into such enormities.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Anthills of the Savannah
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.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Attento, Soul Brother!
Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Collected Poems
The eye is not harmed by sleep.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
She pouted her lips like a gun in my face.
CHINUA ACHEBE
"Misunderstanding", Collected Poems
If one finger brings oil it soils the others.
CHINUA ACHEBE
No Longer at Ease
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Things Fall Apart
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