"A child cannot pay for its mother's milk"

"He saw himself and his fathers crowding round their ancestral shrine waiting in vain for worship and sacrifice and finding nothing but ashes of bygone days.."

"As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look."

"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."

"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it."

"If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?"

"It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly."

"Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?"

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."

"Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

"Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?"

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."

"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

"Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry."

"...stories are not always innocent;...they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you."

"And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate."

"The sun will shine on those who stand, before it shines on those who kneel under them."

"The clock is ticking"

"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

"The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again."

"To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength."

"The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave."

"No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man."

"Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father."

"Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory."

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

"Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."

"There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own."

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

"The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic."

"Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

"Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten"

"Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own."

"Villages that their leaders came together to save themselves."

"At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population."

"I am Fire-that-burns-without-faggots."

"He who brings kola brings life."

"I do not know how to thank you.' 'I can tell you,' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.' 'That will not be enough,' said Okonkwo. 'Then kill yourself,' said Obierika."

"Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death."

"Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them."

"Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?"

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent."

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title."

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph."

"We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print."