Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
Chinua Achebe
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Desperately
Hollow
Passings
Twig
Passing
Normalcy
War
Twigs
Life
Catches
Like
Vines
Hints
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
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
In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.
Chinua Achebe
I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.
Chinua Achebe
It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.
Chinua Achebe
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
When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
Chinua Achebe
Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.
Chinua Achebe
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
Once you have really done all you can, then you can show it to people. But I find this is increasingly not the case with the younger people. They do a first draft and want somebody to finish it off for them with good advice.
Chinua Achebe
Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
Chinua Achebe
I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
Chinua Achebe
While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
Chinua Achebe
An angry man is always a stupid man.
Chinua Achebe
Now one of the changes that must come to Africa is the idea of limited rule, I mean in term of how long one leader can stay in power. The era of president for life is not gone yet but it is on its way out and that is one of the problems with Mugabe and others.
Chinua Achebe
Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.
Chinua Achebe
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.
Chinua Achebe
A chief does not hurry.
Chinua Achebe
Children are very fair minded, they really are.
Chinua Achebe
Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.
Chinua Achebe
I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.
Chinua Achebe
