Quote

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

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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
Great
Layer
Adversaries
Sensitivity
Layers
Thick
Privilege
Tissue
Spread
Spreads
Imagination
Tissues

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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.
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A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.
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When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.
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The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
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The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
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A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.
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The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
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The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
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We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.
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Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.
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When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.
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I have so many ideas there are so many things that need to be done, so many possibilities, you know one is terribly excited, but at the same time, you're almost confused, because you don't know where to begin.
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What a man does not know is greater than he.
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A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
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You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.
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Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.
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After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
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I find Nigeria very frustrating. I am not alone in this. There are many Nigerians abroad. As you know, the brain drain is just incredible. And when we talk to one another and there is a certain sense of frustration and but I struggle not to let the frustration degenerate into dispair.
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Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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