"...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."

"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."

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

"The clock is ticking"

"He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

"The air, which had been stretched taut with excitement, relaxed again."

"To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength."

"The fly that no one to advise it follows the corpse into the grave."

"No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man."

"Fortunately, among these people a man was judged according to his worth and not according to the worth of his father."

"Proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten"

"Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own."

"Villages that their leaders came together to save themselves."

"At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population."

"I am Fire-that-burns-without-faggots."

"He who brings kola brings life."

"I do not know how to thank you.' 'I can tell you,' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.' 'That will not be enough,' said Okonkwo. 'Then kill yourself,' said Obierika."

"Onye nkuzi ewelu itali piagbusie umuaka. One of the ways an emphasis is laid in Ibo is by exaggeration, so that the teacher in the refrain might not actually have flogged the children to death."