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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.

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
Things
Would
Amazed
Think
Students
Thinking
Knew
Didn
Today
Going
Work

More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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What a man does not know is greater than he.
Chinua Achebe
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I don't like to see mistakes on the typewriter. I like a perfect script. On the typewriter I will sometimes leave a phrase that is not right, not what I want, simply because to change it would be a bit messy.
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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A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
Chinua Achebe
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Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. H. P. LOVECRAFT, attributed, Telling It Like It Is Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.
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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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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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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Art should be on the side of humanity.
Chinua Achebe
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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.
Chinua Achebe
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Once a novel gets going and I know it is viable, I don't then worry about plot or themes. These things will come in almost automatically because the characters are now pulling the story.
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 difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.
Chinua Achebe
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Poetry and slave trading cannot be bedfellows. That's where I stand.
Chinua Achebe
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Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?
Chinua Achebe
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A chief does not hurry.
Chinua Achebe
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I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there's no way you can tell that story in one way and say, 'this is it.' Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing ... this is the way I think the world's stories should be told: from many different perspectives.
Chinua Achebe
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The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.
Chinua Achebe
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It always surprised him when he thought of it later that he did not sink under the load of despair.
Chinua Achebe
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After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.
Chinua Achebe