Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Even
Identify
People
Surface
Allow
Begin
Situation
Story
Stories
Might
Removed

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

Image
I'm very primitive I write with a pen.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Wisdom is like a goatskin bag every man carries his own.
Chinua Achebe
Image
In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I am not an early-morning person I don't like to get out of bed, and so I don't begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe
Image
The Novelist As Teacher”: “I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past – with all its imperfections – was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.
Chinua Achebe
Image
...Nothing puzzles God
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
A good leader for instance is somebody like Nelson Mandela. I do not have seen such people coming every generation, maybe every ten generations, every hundred generations. People who are miracle workers.
Chinua Achebe
Image
When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
Image
If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
Image
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
Chinua Achebe
Image
I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.
Chinua Achebe
Image
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
Image
Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.
Chinua Achebe