Best 238 quotes of Chinua Achebe on MyQuotes

Chinua Achebe

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    Chinua Achebe

    A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Actually, I identify with all my characters, good and bad. I have to do that in order to make them genuine. I have to understand them even if I don't approve of them. Not completely - it's impossible; complete identification is, in fact, not desirable.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with every-day herbs.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Africa is people" may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray-a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical & moral deformities

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    Chinua Achebe

    After a war life catches desperately at passing hints of normalcy like vines entwining a hollow twig.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A goat does not eat into a hen's stomach no matter how friendly the two may be.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Almost 30 years before Rwanda, before Darfur, more than 2 million people - mothers, children, babies, civilians - lost their lives as a result of the blatantly callous and unnecessary policies enacted by the leaders of the federal government of Nigeria. It's this charge that's dominated the book's Nigerian press, so far as I can see, the accusation, on the one hand, that Awolowo hatched "a diabolical policy to reduce the numbers of his enemies significantly through starvation - eliminating over two million people, mainly members of future generations.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

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    Chinua Achebe

    Americans, it seems to me, tend to protect their children from the harshness of life, in their interest. That's not the way my people rear their children. They let them experience the world as it is.

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    Chinua Achebe

    An angry man is always a stupid man.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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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    Chinua Achebe

    An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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.

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    Chinua Achebe

    An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb

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    Chinua Achebe

    A pen on paper is the ideal way for me. I am not really very comfortable with machines; I never learned to type very well.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Art is created to make us, to make our passage through the world better, fruitful - and I would say that every story in the end, if it is good, tells us something. This is actually what I meant when I said a novelist is a teacher. Which is why I am constantly dealing with "didactic". Now a teacher in the sense I use it is not somebody who has the profession of standing in front of children, with a piece of chalk in his hand scribbling on the blackboard. That is not the teacher I have in mind. The teacher I have in mind is something less tangible.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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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    Chinua Achebe

    As our fathers said, you can tell a ripe corn by its look.

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    Chinua Achebe

    A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing

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    Chinua Achebe

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

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    Chinua Achebe

    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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    Chinua Achebe

    Children are very fair minded, they really are.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Children are young, but they're not naive. And they're honest. They're not going to keep wide awake if the story is boring. When they get excited you can see it in their eyes.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Colonial rule means that power, initiative is taken away from you by somebody else who makes your decisions. If that goes on long enough, beyond one generation, then the habit of self-rule is forgotten. People are no longer able to realize what it means. To be dependant for a hundred years! And suddenly when this thing ends there is nobody who actually knows how to set about running the country.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can't dance.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in the 11th year you wake up and start practicing again. We have to begin to learn to rule ourselves again.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet. The human world manifests the same reality and will not seek our permission to celebrate itself in the magnificence of its endless varieties. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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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    Chinua Achebe

    Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

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    Chinua Achebe

    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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    Chinua Achebe

    Every generation must find its mission and fulfill it, as Fanon said - or betray it. So it is not something that you can write up on the wall, saying this is what has to be done. Every generation has to discover what it needs to do.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache

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    Chinua Achebe

    For people who are coming out of an oral tradition, it is very exciting to get into reading and writing and it is quite interesting how frequently people want to write their own story. Sometimes it is straight history - this is how we came about, how our town was created, a lot of that kind of effort, as soon as literacy came. The first thing you wanted to do was to put something down about who you are or how you are related to you neighbors. Then the next stage would be the stories, the cultural part of the story: this is the kind of world our ancestors made or aspired to.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Generally, I don't attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it's trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it - without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal.

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    Chinua Achebe

    Good leaders, competent leaders must see it as primary task to create friendliness. This something within the scope of most people. Now artists, like writers and sort of course have an added option of using their scale and talent with this in view. It is their business to create an environment in which our people will prosper and be happy.

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    Chinua Achebe

    He is a fool who treats his brother worse than a stranger.

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    Chinua Achebe

    He who fights for a ne'er-do-well has nothing to show for it except a head covered in earth and grime.

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    Chinua Achebe

    I am against people reaping where they have not sown. But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one.

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    Chinua Achebe

    I am not an early-morning person; I don't like to get out of bed, and so I don't begin writing at five A.M., though some people, I hear, do. I write once my day has started. And I can work late into the night, also.