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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
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More quotes by Chinua Achebe

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When I think of the standing, the importance and the erudition of all these people who see nothing about racism in Heart of Darkness, I'm convinced that we must really be living in different worlds.
Chinua Achebe
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Presidents do not go off on leave without telling the country.
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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And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.
Chinua Achebe
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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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There is no story that is not true, [...] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.
Chinua Achebe
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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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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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If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.
Chinua Achebe
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When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.
Chinua Achebe
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My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don’t see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity. To make humanity uncomfortable, yes. But intrinsically to be against humanity, that I don’t take.
Chinua Achebe
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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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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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This is why I find racism impossible, because this is against humanity.
Chinua Achebe
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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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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 good leader for instance is somebody like Nelson Mandela. I do not have seen such people coming every generation, maybe every ten generations, every hundred generations. People who are miracle workers.
Chinua Achebe
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When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.
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