Chinua Achebe Quotes

• I’ve had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Again, Trouble

• Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don’t expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Myself, Important, Expect

• Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don’t then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Worry, Automatically, Novel

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

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in History

  Tags in Story, Complicated

• 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.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Situation, Identify

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

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Country

  Tags in Without, Presidents

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Find, Rising

• The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Need, Reason, Literature

• The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it’s a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Remember, Long

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Problem, Government

• What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens – whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Country

  Tags in People, Different

• When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in School, Learned, People

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

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Strength, Tradition

• When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Women, Different, Instance

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

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Repair, Damage

• They have not always elected the best leaders, particularly after a long period in which they have not used this facility of free election. You tend to lose the habit.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Leaders, Lose

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

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Trouble, Man

• Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Purpose, Story

• 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

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Wake Up, Practicing

• People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

  Chinua Achebe

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People

Chinua Achebe (42)

Birth:	16th November, 1930
Death:	21st March, 2013
Nationality:	Nigerian
Profession:	Critic, Novelist, Poet, Professor

About

Chinua Achebe was born in the Igbo village of Ogidi, Nigeria Protectorate. He was a Nigerian novelist, poet and professor and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart was considered his magnum opus, and is the most widely read book in modern African literature. He wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonisers", in African literature.  From 2009 until his death, he served as David and Marianna Fisher University Professor and Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University in the United States.

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