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When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.

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
Beat
Hungry
Beats
Fight
Becomes
Fighting
Men
Coward
Sees

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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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.
Chinua Achebe
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Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
Chinua Achebe
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I'm amazed when I think about students today. They know from day one what they are going to be. We didn't. We just coasted. We just knew that things would work out.
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The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
Chinua Achebe
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Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.
Chinua Achebe
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When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
Chinua Achebe
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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
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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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If you're rooted to a spot, you miss a lot of the grace. So you keep moving, and this is the way I think the world's stories should be told - from many different perspectives.
Chinua Achebe
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I don't care about age very much.
Chinua Achebe
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If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.
Chinua Achebe
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A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.
Chinua Achebe
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I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.
Chinua Achebe
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It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
Chinua Achebe
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Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
Chinua Achebe
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[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?
Chinua Achebe
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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
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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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A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing
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