Chinua Achebe Quotes

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Chinua Achebe

Profession : Writer

Birth : November 16, 1930

In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.

Chinua Achebe

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.

Chinua Achebe

A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

Chinua Achebe

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

Chinua Achebe

The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.

Chinua Achebe

Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.

Chinua Achebe

People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.

Chinua Achebe

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

Chinua Achebe

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

Chinua Achebe

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

Chinua Achebe

The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!

Chinua Achebe

The whole idea of a stereotype is to simplify. Instead of going through the problem of all this great diversity - that it's this or maybe that - you have just one large statement; it is this.

Chinua Achebe

A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

Chinua Achebe

The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.

Chinua Achebe

I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

Chinua Achebe

I don't care about age very much. I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.

Chinua Achebe

When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths; it is because we see something which you do not see.

Chinua Achebe

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

Chinua Achebe

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

Chinua Achebe

Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.

Chinua Achebe