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

"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."

"...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."

"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."

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

"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.."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Procrastination is a lazy man's apology."

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

"Women and music should not be dated."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"...Nothing puzzles God"

"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."