Chinua Achebe Quotes
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When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
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Nigera is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.
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Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest.
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I was a supporter of the desire, in my section of Nigeria, to leave the federation because it was treated very badly with something that was called genocide in those days.
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The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.
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Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.
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We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.
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Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up.
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When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.
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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.
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Oh, the most important thing about myself is that my life has been full of changes. Therefore, when I observe the world, I don't expect to see it just like I was seeing the fellow who lives in the next room.
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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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I've had trouble now and again in Nigeria because I have spoken up about the mistreatment of factions in the country because of difference in religion. These are things we should put behind us.
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The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.
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You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree - the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.
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A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.
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An artist, in my understanding of the word, should side with the people against the Emperor that oppresses his or her people.
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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.
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When the British came to Ibo land, for instance, at the beginning of the 20th century, and defeated the men in pitched battles in different places, and set up their administrations, the men surrendered. And it was the women who led the first revolt.
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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.
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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I think back to the old people I knew when I was growing up, and they always seemed larger than life.
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When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.
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What a country needs to do is be fair to all its citizens - whether people are of a different ethnicity or gender.