When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands.
CHINUA ACHEBEIt 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.
More Chinua Achebe Quotes
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The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.
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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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Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
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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.
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We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya: ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’
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A disease that has never been seen before cannot be cured with every-day herbs.
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It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.
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People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that’s the time to do something about it, not when it’s around your neck.
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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.
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As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.
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A coward may cover the ground with his words but when the time comes to fight he runs away.
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Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.
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Each of my books is different. Deliberately. I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
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A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.
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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.
CHINUA ACHEBE