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When we hear a house has fallen do we ask if the ceiling fell with it?
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
Asks
House
Ceiling
Ceilings
Provoking
Fell
Fallen
Hear
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
We live in a sea of general ideas, so that's not a novel, since there are so many general ideas. But the moment a particular idea is linked to a character, it's like an engine moves it. Then you have a novel underway.
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No man however great is greater than his people
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Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
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When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
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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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I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.
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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.
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Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
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As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
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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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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.
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
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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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I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.
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
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 is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
Chinua Achebe
The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
