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When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
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Chinua Achebe
Age: 82 †
Born: 1930
Born: November 16
Died: 2013
Died: March 22
Essayist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Short Story Writer
University Teacher
Writer
Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
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Stories
School
Going
Encountered
People
Lands
Began
Learned
Land
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world.
Chinua Achebe
Actually, I identify with all my characters, good and bad. I have to do that in order to make them genuine. I have to understand them even if I don't approve of them. Not completely - it's impossible complete identification is, in fact, not desirable.
Chinua Achebe
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.
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
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
A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
Chinua Achebe
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.
Chinua Achebe
It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.
Chinua Achebe
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
Chinua Achebe
In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.
Chinua Achebe
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
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.
Chinua Achebe
I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.
Chinua Achebe
Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation.
Chinua Achebe
The language of young men is pull down and destroy but an old man speaks of conciliation.
Chinua Achebe
There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Chinua Achebe
When old people speak it is not because of the sweetness of words in our mouths it is because we see something which you do not see.
Chinua Achebe
There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.
Chinua Achebe
The problem with leaderless uprisings taking over is that you don't always know what you get at the other end. If you are not careful you could replace a bad government with one much worse!
Chinua Achebe
The people you see in Nigeria today have always lived as neighbors in the same space for as long as we can remember. So it's a matter of settling down, lowering the rhetoric, the level of hostility in the rhetoric is too high.
Chinua Achebe
