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It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

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
Classical
Express
English
Society
Difficult
Reality

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity.
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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.
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.
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The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.
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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
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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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It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.
Chinua Achebe
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Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.
Chinua Achebe
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Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.
Chinua Achebe
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Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
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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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
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We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
Chinua Achebe
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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
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A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.
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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Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.
Chinua Achebe
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I do not actually see how art, literature can be anything other that being in that domain of trying to tell us, trying to get us to see what is important in our lives.
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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A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
Chinua Achebe