"A crown is a pitiless master, harsher than the staff of a pig-keeper; while a staff bears up, a crown weighs down, beyond the strength of any man to wear it lightly."

"“Believe what you like. You'll be surprised how comforting it is.” “I ask no comfort,” Taran replied, “but the truth, be it harsh or happy.”"

"We’re neither good nor evil. We’re simply interested in things as they are."

"“It is easy to judge evil unmixed,” replied Gwydion. “But, alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging.”"

"Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty, too."

"Child, child, do you not see? For each of us comes a time when we must be more than what we are."

"I have marched in many a battle host," Adaon answered quietly, "but I have also planted seeds and reaped the harvest with my own hands. And I have learned there is greater honor in a field well plowed than in a field steeped in blood."

"“There is much to be known,” said Adaon, “and above all much to be loved, be it the turn of the seasons or the shape of a river pebble. Indeed, the more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.”"

"“So you say, so you say,” murmured Fflewddur, hurrying after him. “Look closer into your heart. You may find your opinion to be somewhat different.”"

"There is truth in all things, if you understand them well."

"Once you have courage to look upon evil, seeing it for what it is and naming it by its true name, it is powerless against you, and you can destroy it."

"Even in a fantasy realm, growing up is accomplished not without cost."

"This is a place of peace," Medwyn said, "and therefore not suitable for men, at least, not yet."

"A pig is a pig," said the stranger, "and a pig-boy is a pig-boy."

"We hold each other’s lives in our open hands, not in clenched fists."

"The destinies of men are woven one with the other, and you can turn aside from them no more than you can turn aside from your own."

"Is there worse evil than that which goes in the mask of good?"

"Neither refuse to give help when it is needed," Medwyn continued, "nor refuse to accept it when it is offered."

"Why?" Dallben interrupted. "In some cases," he said, "we learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself."

"It is not the trappings that make the prince, nor, indeed, the sword that makes the warrior."

"The task counts more than the one who does it."

"I don't even know who I am." "In a way," answered Gwydion, "that is something we must all discover for ourselves."

"Are these signs of hope, or do we deceive ourselves by wishing them to be?"

"I can't make sense out of that girl," he said to the bard. "Can you?" "Never mind," Fflewddur said. "We aren't really expected to."

"He has begun to resuscitate and reinstate the past, the precolonial era. I'm thinking of Arrow of God, which to my mind is perhaps the best novel to come out of Africa. I think it is an absolutely wonderful novel. And if you look at that novel, it really has almost nothing to do with the impact of the white man. It is about black life, black civilization, before the period of conquest. The period of conquest is just on the horizon, so to speak. But there are not many people who have tackled that kind of theme. There are not many black writers who have done it yet."

"Chinua Achebe was a real education for me, a real education."

"Camara Laye’s The Dark Child and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart because they gave me a glorious shock of recognition. Until I read them, I was not consciously aware that people who looked like me could exist in books. I grew up in a Nigerian university town, and all the books I read before then were foreign children’s books with white characters doing unfamiliar things."

"I do reread novels I love, like Chinua Achebe’s “Arrow of God,” to remind myself of what fiction can do."

"There was another epidemic that was not talked about much, a silent scourge—the explosion of mental illness: major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had ever witnessed."

"When I read Things Fall Apart which is about an Ibo tribe in Nigeria, a tribe I never saw, a system-to put it that way or a society, the rules of which were a mystery to me, I recognized everybody in it. And that book was about my father. How we got over I don't know, we did!""

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

"Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world."

"Achebe is a great writer. He is the father of our English literature. You can't take that away from him. His work is highly original. When I was doing my degree here, I used Arrow of God, which I think is his best work. But the critics seem to think everything should be like Things Fall Apart. Everytime you want to read Achebe, you feel you want to study it as literature. You don't pick it up as though you want to enjoy the literature. That is why for a very, very long time, if you went to the African Writers Series, you had the feeling that this is not for the common people."

"The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations."

"It is appropriate that we celebrate Martin Luther King, a man who struggled so valiantly to restore humanity to the oppressed and the oppressor."

"Some people flinch when you talk about art in the context of the needs of society thinking you are introducing something far too common for a discussion of art. Why should art have a purpose and a use? Art shouldn't be concerned with purpose and reason and need, they say. These are improper. But from the very beginning, it seems to me, stories have indeed been meant to be enjoyed, to appeal to that part of us which enjoys good form and good shape and good sound."

"The point in all this is that language is a handy whipping boy to summon and belabor when we have failed in some serious way. In other words, we play politics with language, and in so doing conceal the reality and the complexity of our situation from ourselves and from those foolish enough to put their trust in us."

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

"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."

"I rank Achebe very highly, especially his Arrow of God, and I consider it a tragedy that he has had to live under such disturbed conditions and writes so little."

"Paradoxically, a saint like [Albert] Schweitzer can give one a lot more trouble than King Leopold II, villain of unmitigated guilt, because along with doing good and saving African lives Schweitzer also managed to announce that the African was indeed his brother, but only his junior brother."

"The dispossession that caused my shrillness is in retreat though the marks of its pillage are still everywhere. I can see, in spite of them, that I have come a long way."

"It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth or falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity."

"The Igbo nation in precolonial times was not quite like any nation most people are familiar with. It did not have the apparatus of centralized government but a conglomeration of hundreds of independent towns and villages each of which shared the running of its affairs among its menfolk according to title, age, occupation, etc.; and its women folk who had domestic responsibilities as well as the management of the scores of four-day and eight-day markets that bound the entire region and its neighbours in a network of daily exchange of goods and news, from far and near."

"We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n'ani ji onwe ya: "He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down."