CHINUA ACHEBE QUOTES III

Nigerian writer (1930-2013)

Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep--her face
turned to the wall!

CHINUA ACHEBE

Attento, Soul Brother!

Tags: love


Death is tolerable only when it leads again to life.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Collected Poems

Tags: death


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!


What really worries me is that those who are in positions of power are not really affected by what we are writing. In the moral dialogue you want to start, you really want to involve the leaders. People ask me: "Why were you so bold as to publish A Man of the People? How did you think the Government was going to take it? You didn't know there was going to be a coup?" I said rather flippantly that nobody was going to read it anyway, so I wasn't likely to be fired from my official position. It's a distressing thought that we cannot engage our leaders in the kind of moral debate we need.

CHINUA ACHEBE

interview, Sunday Nation, Jan. 15, 1967


Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra

Tags: writing


Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: charity


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

Tags: failure, pride


A debt may get mouldy, but it never decays.

CHINUA ACHEBE

No Longer at Ease

Tags: debt


Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in criticisms of his work is due to the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: Joseph Conrad, racism


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

Tags: language, words


The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: women


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

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: writing


The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Morning Yet on Creation Day

Tags: language


The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: power


But like all the other women I have referred to, she expressed herself with passionate and disarming effrontery.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: women


Come here into the hollow of my conscience
I will show you a thing or two
I will show you the heat of my love.
You know what?
I can give you babies too
Real leaders of tomorrow
Right here under the bridge
I can give you real leaders of thought.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


Praise bounteous
providence if you will
that grants even an ogre
a tiny glow-worm
tenderness encapsulated
in icy caverns of cruel
heart or else despair
for in the very germ
of that kindred love is
lodged the perpetuity
of evil.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Attento, Soul Brother!

Tags: providence


It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.

CHINUA ACHEBE

interview, Okike, 1990

Tags: writing


The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Arrow of God

Tags: travel


The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

Tags: talent