Chinua Achebe Quotes

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what to do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

Soon, nostalgia will be another name for Europe.

It's good to pass on stories.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

A good story never dies.

History is not everything, but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.

History takes time... History makes memory.

… history is that which transforms documents into monuments

You can't build a future if you don't have a past.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

Death steals everything except our stories.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.

Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

If we do not honor our past, we lose our future. If we destroy our roots, we cannot grow.

I think the history and the past we have is just an energy we've built up to do what we do now.

We've got to know our history. We have to be able to bring our children to a place that they can be proud of.