Quote

I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

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
Sown
Toads
Juicy
Fats
Saying
Look
Looks
Reaping
People
Toad

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

Image
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
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
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
Image
It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.
Chinua Achebe
Image
If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others.
Chinua Achebe
Image
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Children are very fair minded, they really are.
Chinua Achebe
Image
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
Chinua Achebe
Image
What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
Chinua Achebe
Image
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have narrowness of heart and mind is not.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.
Chinua Achebe
Image
There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe