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That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.

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
Ignorant
Mystery
Deep
Known
Incurably
Mysteries
Surrounded

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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Anybody who wants to rule a group will find that if this group is quarreling among themselves they leave you alone.
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The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
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Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
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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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Children are very fair minded, they really are.
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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.
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We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
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My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take.
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A chief does not hurry.
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It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
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Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.
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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.
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My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.
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Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
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Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
Chinua Achebe
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Art should be on the side of humanity.
Chinua Achebe
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When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
Chinua Achebe
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...Nothing puzzles God
Chinua Achebe
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One reason why I am quite angry with what is happening in Nigeria today is that everything has collapsed. If I decide to go back now, there will be so many problems - where will I find the physical therapy and other things that I now require?
Chinua Achebe
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It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.
Chinua Achebe