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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.
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
Already
People
Confirm
Heads
Africa
Fail
Fronts
Front
Failing
More quotes by Chinua Achebe
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
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There must be areas in which a particular character does not represent you.
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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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...Nothing puzzles God
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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
Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.
Chinua Achebe
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.
Chinua Achebe
I think the language that we use in dealing with one another is very important. And even if I am called upon to bring out some money to support a regime, and I am entitled to say I do not like what that regime does and obviously I am not going to put money there - you cannot really say this is wrong or this is unreasonable.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
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.
Chinua Achebe
The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
Chinua Achebe
The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
Chinua Achebe
Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.
Chinua Achebe
After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
Chinua Achebe
A chief does not hurry.
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
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
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