Chinua Achebe Quotes

To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

The truth is, everybody falls into an incinerator of some measure or other. Not literally one. The question is what are you going to do with those bad times? Are you just going to let them gnaw at you?

You can't let every bad thing that happens to you in your life overtake you.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

We thought the hard part was over—but we were wrong. Living is the hardest part. Figuring out how to live your life when you’re all busted up inside and out—there is nothing harder.

At first I was almost about to despair, I thought I never could bear it — but I did I bear it. The question remains: how?

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to wake up one more time. It is harder to stay where you are than to get out.

I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep going

And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.

One can bear anything. The pain we cannot bear will kill us outright.

First, I thought, almost despairing, This must crush my spirit now; Yet I bore it, and am bearing- Only do not ask me how.

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to make yourself wake up one more time. It's harder to stay where you are than to get out. For everyone but you, that is.

Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.

It takes a lot of energy and creativity to make such screwed up lives carry on. And the kind of will people have to survive, year after year, dealing with that stuff, is weirdly impressive.

When times are difficult, I tell myself, 'I'm just passing through.'

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

Even as a child, I found a way to survive.

They did it to try and belittle me, to try and to take away my pride. But I went through the whole system with them. And at the end, I - I wanted the public to know that I was okay, even though I was hurting.

My mother had no end of tragedy in her life. She would make herself get up and take a deep breath and go out and do laundry. Hang up sheets.

I may have some things tougher than the average person, but there are a lot of people who are going through worse things than me. I can't live in fear.

Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover.

I had no idea that what I thought was my low wasn't really my low. That's what a lot of people think - then life reminds them, 'No, there's lower.'

As long as you don't fold up and curl up into a ball, you'll be all right.

You have to learn to live with the hard things in life and go on.

The stuff I've seen and lived and survived. Gun to my head, cops coming to your house. I had the confidence of telling myself that I'm going to make it. Everything I've been through, I could've had a mental breakdown, but I kept it together. If I didn't have that confidence I wouldn't have made it. That confidence has nothing to do with basketball.