If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place.

I believe in the complexity of the human story and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, This is it. Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing; the same person telling the story will tell it differently. I think of that masquerade in Igbo festivals that dances in the public arena. The Igbo people say, If you want to see it well, you must not stand in one place. The masquerade is moving through this big arena. Dancing. If you’re rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world’s stories should be told—from many different perspectives.
― Chinua Achebe

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart 

Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

― Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah 

A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.

― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

― Chinua Achebe

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."

― Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays