93 quotes
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra (2012)
‘I can’t—we must—I mean it is impossible for me to marry Nweke’s daughter.’ ‘Impossible. Why?’ asked his father. ‘I don’t love her.’ ‘Nobody said you did. Why should you?’
Marriage Is a Private Affair (1952)
Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.
Things Fall Apart (1958)
Real tragedy is never resolved. It goes on hopelessly forever. Conventional tragedy is too easy. The hero dies and we feel a purging of the emotions. A real tragedy takes place in a corner, in an untidy spot, to quote W. H. Auden.
No Longer at Ease (1960)
The white man is very clever. He came quietly 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.
Things Fall Apart (1958)
Measure out
[their] joys and agonies
too, our long, long passion week
in paces of the dance”
Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems (1972)
I do not see that it is necessary for any people to prove to another that they build cathedrals or pyramids before they can be entitled to peace and safety.
The Education of a British-Protected Child (2009)
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.
But he was not the man to go about telling his neighbors that he was in error. And so people said he had no respect for the gods of the clan. His enemies said that his good fortune had gone to his head.
Things Fall Apart (1958)
After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation--a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them.
Things Fall Apart (1958)
a man should hold his compound together, not plant dissension among his children
Arrow of God (1964)
The dispossession that caused my shrillness is in retreat though the marks of its pillage are still everywhere. I can see, in spite of them, that I have come a long way.
Home and Exile (2000)
What mattered was that a man had treated me as no man had a right to treat another—not even if he was master and the other slave; and my manhood requires that I made him pay for his insult in full measure.
Man of the People (1966)
Nnaemeka, for his own part, was very deeply affected by his father’s grief. But he kept hoping that it would pass away. If it had occurred to him that never in the history of his people had a man married a woman who spoke a different tongue, he might have been less optimistic.
Marriage Is a Private Affair (1952)
Then the stranger went away and Mr. Nwaba retired to his room. Chike did not give much thought to the incident at the time. But he was to remember it later.
Chike and the River (1966)
My people have a saying which my father often used. A man whose horse is missing will look everywhere even in the roof.
Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
Although he was still only a child it looked as though the deity had already marked him out as his future Chief. Even before he had learnt to speak more than a few words he had been strongly drawn to the god’s ritual.
Arrow of God (1964)
They led and he followed blindly, his heavy chest heaving up and down in silent weeping ... it was the worst kind of madness, deep and tongue-tied.
Girls at War and Other Stories (1973)
Charity is the opium of the privileged
Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.
Things Fall Apart (1958)