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Beware Okonkwo! she warned. Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!

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
Exchanging
Warned
Beware
Speaks
Words
Speak
Doe
Men

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Serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict.
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The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
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When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.
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The most awful thing about power is not that it corrupts absolutely but that it makes people so utterly boring, so predictable.
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If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others.
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You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.
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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.
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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.
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An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb
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...Nothing puzzles God
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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.
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I don't praise my people. I am their greatest critic.
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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.
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A chief does not hurry.
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When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.
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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.
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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.
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When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.
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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.
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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