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The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.

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
Trouble
Squarely
Nigeria
Failure
Leadership
Simply

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.
Chinua Achebe
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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.
Chinua Achebe
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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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That we are surrounded by deep mysteries is known to all but the incurably ignorant.
Chinua Achebe
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Whatever music you beat on your drum there is somebody who can dance to it.
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A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.
Chinua Achebe
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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
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The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
Chinua Achebe
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It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
Chinua Achebe
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When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.
Chinua Achebe
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I tell my students, it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different color, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.
Chinua Achebe
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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.
Chinua Achebe
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Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.
Chinua Achebe
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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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...when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
Chinua Achebe
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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
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In my definition I am a protest writer, with restraint.
Chinua Achebe
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A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines I never learned to type very well.
Chinua Achebe
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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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Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.
Chinua Achebe