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Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig.
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
Mark
Missing
Learned
Without
Men
Twig
Twigs
Shoot
More quotes by 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
Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.
Chinua Achebe
Become familiar with your home, but know also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.
Chinua Achebe
Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache
Chinua Achebe
What you must accept is that your life is not going to be the same while you are writing.
Chinua Achebe
I don't like to see mistakes on the typewriter. I like a perfect script. On the typewriter I will sometimes leave a phrase that is not right, not what I want, simply because to change it would be a bit messy.
Chinua Achebe
Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
Chinua Achebe
It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
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
People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.
Chinua Achebe
A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
Chinua Achebe
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
This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.
Chinua Achebe
No man however great is greater than his people
Chinua Achebe
A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
Chinua Achebe
There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
Chinua Achebe
Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.
Chinua Achebe
There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.
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
