Chinua Achebe Quotes About Literature

Quotes about: Literature

• My weapon is literature

  Chinua Achebe

  Literature, Weapons

• 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

  Light, Years, Needs

• I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

  Chinua Achebe

  Doors, Color, Different

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Oct 31, 2015

• Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

  Chinua Achebe

  Reality, Giving, Literature

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.215, Anchor

• 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

  Art, Trying, Important

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• There are people who say that if you are told that your house has fallen you don't ask what about the ceiling or what about the windows. The main thing is that this house, Africa, has fallen. Literature is just one aspect, pick any aspect of the situation.

  Chinua Achebe

  People, House, Ceilings

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• The market literature, which was particularly strong in Igboland, in Onitsha, today it is no longer strong. It is one of the victims of the civil war, that market was actually destroyed and at the end of the war a new Nigeria has struggled to come into being and I believe that what is probably going to replace the market literature might be the video, which they have taken to in a big way, creating dramas. So that may be the next thing way we will see coming out of the local basic level in our society.

  Chinua Achebe

  Strong, War, Drama

• My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.

  Chinua Achebe

  Jobs, Book, Mean

  Chinua Achebe, Bernth Lindfors (1997). “Conversations with Chinua Achebe”, p.19, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

  Chinua Achebe

  Latin, Inspiration, Native American

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.51, Penguin

• I teach literature. That's easy for me. Take someone else's work and talk about it.

  Chinua Achebe

  Literature, Easy, Teach

• You don't ever want to say to a young person, You can't, or, You are no good. Some people might be able to do it, but I don't think I am a policeman for literature. So I tell them, Sweat it out, do your best.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Sweat, People

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