Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum… The story is our escort. Without it we are blind… It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.
CHINUA ACHEBEIt is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.
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 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.
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The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.
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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.
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When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.
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No man however great is greater than his people.
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A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.
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People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.
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No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.
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As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.
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There is that great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
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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.
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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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Dancing is very important nowadays. No girl will look at you if you can’t dance.
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Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.
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An angry man is always a stupid man.
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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.
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While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.
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What a man does not know is greater than he.
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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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The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.
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It is the story that owns and directs us. It is the thing that makes us different from cattle; it is the mark on the face that sets one people apart from their neighbors.
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We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.
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Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.
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In dealing with a man who thinks you are a fool, it is good sometimes to remind him that you know what he knows but have chosen to appear foolish for the sake of peace.
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People go to Africa and confirm what they already have in their heads and so they fail to see what is there in front of them.
CHINUA ACHEBE