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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.

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
Able
English
Ancestral
Feel
Weight
Altered
Feels
Full
Surroundings
Language
Communion
Experience
Suit
Stills
African
Home
Suits
Still
Carry

More quotes by 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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There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Chinua Achebe
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It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.
Chinua Achebe
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One would think he never sucked at his mother’s breast.
Chinua Achebe
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Art should be on the side of humanity.
Chinua Achebe
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When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.
Chinua Achebe
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I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.
Chinua Achebe
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In fact, I thought that Christianity was very a good and a very valuable thing for us. But after a while, I began to feel that the story that I was told about this religion wasn't perhaps completely whole, that something was left out.
Chinua Achebe
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It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escortwithout it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the storyrather,it is the story that owns us.
Chinua Achebe
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Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.
Chinua Achebe
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The man that brings ant-infested faggots into his hut should not grumble when lizards begin to pay him a visit.
Chinua Achebe
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It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.
Chinua Achebe
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Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
Chinua Achebe
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I think once you have done all you can to a manuscript, let it find its way in the world.
Chinua Achebe
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If you have leaders who are prepared to incite group against group it is very easy to manufacture reasons and excuses.
Chinua Achebe
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Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.
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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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
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I'm very primitive I write with a pen.
Chinua Achebe
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When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
Chinua Achebe