The African Trilogy Quotes

“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. The rest of the world is unaware of it.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God

“When you have paid a hundred and thirty pounds bride-price and you are only a second-class clerk, you find you haven’t got any more to spare on other women.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“Children left their old parents at home and scattered in all directions in search of money. It was hard on an old woman with eight children. It was like having a river and yet washing one’s hands with spittle.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“His mind, never content with shallow satisfactions, crept to the brink of knowing. What kind of power was it if it would never be used?”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“Okoye, meanwhile, took the lump of chalk, drew some lines on the floor, and then painted his big toe.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“Wherever something stands, something else will stand beside it.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“The fly that has no one to advise him follows the corpse into the ground.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“one man with vision—an enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance?”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“Its body was carved with men and pythons and little steps were cut on one side; without these the drummer could not climb to the top to beat it. When the Ikolo was beaten for war it was decorated with skulls won in past wars. But now it sang of peace.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“This was what British administration was doing among the Ibos, making a dozen mushroom kings grow where there was none before.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“Any evil which you might have seen with your eyes, or spoken with your mouth, or heard with your ears or trodden with your feet; whatever your father might have brought upon you or your mother brought upon you, I cover them all here.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“he was as good as any young man, or better because young men were no longer what they used to be.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“She believed because it was that faith alone that gave her own life any kind of meaning.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God

“I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy

“What was missing in all of them, he thought, was a recognition of Africans as people with projects—lives they were leading, aspirations they were striving for—and a rich existing culture, exemplified in the proverbs and the religious traditions that are threaded through these novels. He was writing, as he often said, against the Africa of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”
― Chinua Achebe, The African Trilogy