Top 50 Quotes You Need for Your Essay from Things Fall Apart

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#11: Umuofia was like a startled animal with ears erect, sniffling the silent, ominous air and not knowing which way to run.

• Techniques: Simile, metaphor, imagery
• Chapter 23

#12: …they came to the tree from which Okonkwo’s body was dangling, and they stopped dead

• Techniques: Symbolism, imagery 
• Chapter 25

Colonialism

#13: ‘I am greatly afraid. We have heard stories about white men who made the powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves across the seas, but no one thought the stories were true.’

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, sibilance, fearful tone, foreshadowing
• Characters: Obierika, Okonkwo
• Chapter 15

#14: I forgot to tell you another thing which the Oracle said. It said that other white men were on their way. They were locusts, it said, and that first man was their harbinger sent to explore the terrain. And so they killed him.

• Techniques: Biblical allusion, foreshadowing, colloquialism 
• Characters: Obierika, Okonkwo
• Chapter 15

#15: “Your gods are not alive and cannot do you any harm,” replied the white man. “They are pieces of wood and stone.”

• Techniques: Metonym, condescending tone
• Chapter 16

#16: But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwo’s first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him…It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and persistent question that haunted his young soul – the question of the twins crying in the bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed.

• Techniques: Metaphoric language, biblical allusions, rhythmic long sentences
• Characters: Nwoye
• Chapter 16

#17: An “evil forest” was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness. It was such a forest that the rulers of Mbanta gave to the missionaries. They did not really want them in their clan, and so they made them that offer which nobody in his right senses would accept.

• Techniques: Omniscient third-person narration, personification
• Chapter 17

#18: The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

• Techniques: Metaphor, juxtaposition
• Chapter 20

#19: The white man had indeed brought a lunatic religion, but he had also built a trading store and for the first time palm-oil and kernel became things of great price, and much money flowed into Umuofia.

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, imagery, personification, contrast 
• Characters: Obierika, Okonkwo
• Chapter 21

#20: Mr. Brown’s successor was the Reverend James Smith, and he was a different kind of man. He condemned openly Mr. Brown’s policy of compromise and accommodation. He saw things as black and white. And black was evil.

• Techniques: Contrast, foreshadowing
• Characters: Mr. Brown, Reverend James Smith
• Chapter 22

#21: In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Officer must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point.

• Techniques: Perspective shift, ambiguity 
• Chapter 24

Masculinity 

#22: Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.

• Techniques: Repetition, motif, third-person narration
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 2 

#22: Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop.

• Techniques: Conduplicatio, symbolism 
• Characters: Umuofia 
• Chapter 3

#23: …[Okonkwo] was not afraid of war. He was a man of action, a man of war. Unlike his father he could stand the look of blood. In Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head.

• Techniques: Conduplicatio, consonance, contrast 
• Characters: Okonkwo 
• Chapter 2

#24: Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through

• Techniques: Third-person narration, objective tone, characterisation
• Characters: Okonkwo, Ojiugo
• Chapter 4

#25: Ezinma took the dish in one hand and the empty water bowl in the other and went back to her mother’s hut. “She should have been a boy,” Okonkwo said to himself again. His mind went back to Ikemefuna and he shivered.

• Techniques: Parataxis, contrast 
• Characters: Ezinma, Okonkwo
• Chapter 8

#26: “Okonkwo never did things by halves. When his wife Ekwefi protested that two goats were sufficient for the feast he told her that it was not her affair” 

• Techniques: Analogy, plain tone 
• Characters: Okonkwo, Ekwefi
• Chapter 19

#27: Although he had prospered in his motherland Okonkwo knew that he would have prospered even more in Umuofia, in the land of his fathers where men were bold and warlike.

• Techniques: Imagery, connotations 
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 19

#28: …but it was a resilient spirit, and in the end Okonkwo overcame his sorrow. He had five other sons and he would bring them up in the way of the clan

• Techniques: Euphemism, analepsis, foreshadowing
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 20

Religion

#29: Everybody knew [Ezinma] was an ogbanje. These sudden bouts of sickness and health were typical of her kind. But she had lived so long that perhaps she had decided to stay. Some of them did become tired of their evil rounds of birth and death, or took pity on their mothers, and stayed.

• Techniques: Characterisation, symbolism 
• Characters: Ezinma, Okonkwo
• Chapter 9

#30: A man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi. The saying of the elders was not true—that if a man said yea his chi also affirmed. Here was a man whose chi said nay despite his own affirmation.

• Techniques: Contrast, conduplicatio 
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 14

#31: …the Christians had grown in number and were now a small community of men, women and children, self-assured and confident.

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, lexical chain, metonym
• Chapter 19

#31: It was Wednesday in Holy Week and Mr. Kiaga had asked the women to bring red earth and white chalk and water to scrub the church for Easter, and the women had formed themselves into three groups for this purpose. They set out early that morning, some of them with their water-pots to the stream, another group with hoes and baskets to the village earth pit, and the others to the chalk quarry. 

• Techniques: Imagery, tricolon, polysyndeton, 
• Chapter 19

#32: One of the greatest crimes a man could commit was to unmask an egwugwu in public, or to say or do anything which might reduce its immortal prestige in the eyes of the uninitiated. And this was what Enoch did.

• Techniques: Parataxis, superlative
• Chapter 22

Culture

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

• Techniques: Metaphor, proverb 
• Chapter 1

#34: Umuofia was feared by all its neighbors. It was powerful in war and in magic, and its priests and medicine men were feared in all the surrounding country. Its most potent war-medicine was as old as the clan itself. Nobody knew how old.

• Techniques: Symbolism, lexical chain
• Chapter 2

#35: Unoka was an ill-fated man. He had a bad chi or personal god, and evil fortune followed him to the grave, or rather to his death, for he had no grave. He died of the swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess.

• Techniques: Polysyndeton, analepsis 
• Characters: Unoka
• Chapter 3

#36: Okonkwo cleared his throat and moved his feet to the beat of the drums. It filled him with fire as it had always done from his youth. He trembled with the desire to conquer and subdue. It was like the desire for woman.

• Techniques: Metaphor, simile
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 5

#37: The drummers stopped for a brief rest before the real matches. Their bodies shone with sweat, and they took up fans and began to fan themselves. They also drank water from small pots and ate kola nuts. They became ordinary human beings again, talking and laughing among themselves and with others who stood near them.

• Techniques: Sibilance, metaphor, polysyndeton, imagery 
• Chapter 6

#38: …the child was an ogbanje, one of those wicked children who, when they died, entered their mothers’ wombs to be born again

• Techniques: Complex syntax, connotations
• Characters: Ekwefi, Okonkwo
• Chapter 9

#39: The clan was like a lizard; if it lost its tail it soon grew another.

• Techniques: Analogy, simile 
• Chapter 20

#40: One of the most infuriating habits of these people was their love of superfluous words, he thought.

• Techniques: Superlative 
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 24

Family

#41: He heard Ikemefuna cry, “My father, they have killed me!” as he ran towards him. Dazed with fear, Okonkwo drew his machete and cut him down. He was afraid of being thought weak.

• Techniques: Juxtaposition, connotations, motif
• Characters: Ikemefuna, Okwonkwo
• Chapter 8

#41: It’s true that a child belongs to its father. But when a father beats his child, it seeks sympathy in its mother’s hut. A man belongs to his fatherland when things are good and life is sweet. But when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. 

• Techniques: Proverb, contrast, sibilance, metonym  
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 14

Gender

#42: Nwoye knew that it was right to be masculine and to be violent, but somehow he still preferred the stories that his mother used to tell…

• Techniques: Contrast, juxtaposition
• Characters: Nwoye, Nwoye’s mother
• Chapter 7

#43 A chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the very day it hatches. I have done my best to make Nwoye grow into a man, but there is too much of his mother in him.

• Techniques: Analogy, hyperbolic language
• Characters: Nwoye, Okonkwo
• Chapter 8

Okonkwo

#44: When he walked, his heels hardly touched the ground and he seemed to walk on springs, as if he was going to pounce on somebody. And he did pounce on people quite often.

• Techniques: Metaphor, repetition, imagery
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 1

#45: But Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through, not even for fear of a goddess.

• Techniques: Characterisation, dark humour
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 2

#46: The crime [of murder] was of two kinds, male and female. Okonkwo had committed the female, because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after seven years.

• Techniques: Contrast, truncated sentences
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 13

#47: Why should a man suffer so grievously for an offense he had committed inadvertently? But although [Okonkwo] thought for a long time he found no answer. He was merely led into greater complexities. He remembered his wife’s twin children, whom he had thrown away. What crime had they committed?

• Techniques: Rhetorical question, irony
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 13

#48: “Let us not reason like cowards,” said Okonkwo. “If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does.”

• Techniques: Hypophora, violent imagery
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 18

#49: Okonkwo was deeply grieved. And it was not just a personal grief. He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women.

• Techniques: Metaphor, simile, contrast 
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 21

#50: Okonkwo slept very little that night. The bitterness in his heart was now mixed with a kind of childlike excitement. Before he had gone to bed he had brought down his war dress, which he had not touched since his return from exile. He had shaken out his smoked raffia skirt and examined his tall feather head-gear and his shield. They were all satisfactory, he thought.

• Techniques: Imagery, juxtaposition  
• Characters: Okonkwo
• Chapter 24