"You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself."

"The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others."

"A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness"

"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."

"Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size"

"The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping."

"Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?"

"...Nothing puzzles God"

"At the most one could say that his chi or ... personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed."

"There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless."

"Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform."

"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."

"Women and music should not be dated."

"For whom is it well, for whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well."

"Procrastination is a lazy man's apology."

"An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb"

"A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing"

"The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general."

"It will be all over this day week - comfort - discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of traveling."

"Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

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

"A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction"

"What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying"

"Language is wine upon the lips"

"Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once."

"We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on"

"That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant."

"There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him."

"When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight."

"When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth"

"In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint."

"It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors."

"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."