Quote

There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

Chinua Achebe

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chinua Achebe
Age: 82 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 16
Died: 2013
Died: March 22
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
Saying
Men
Danced
Drums
Beaten

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

Image
Children are very fair minded, they really are.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I'm very primitive I write with a pen.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?
Chinua Achebe
Image
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I couldn't tell you why but now I know a story is in fact where you discover who you are, where a culture discovers what it is and I just think that this is a terribly important place to get into and that I would enjoy it.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.
Chinua Achebe
Image
A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.
Chinua Achebe