We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.
CHINUA ACHEBEIt is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
More Chinua Achebe Quotes
-
-
When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
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 -
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 -
The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
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 -
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’
CHINUA ACHEBE -
It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
Women and music should not be dated.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
CHINUA ACHEBE -
You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.
CHINUA ACHEBE