The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.
CHINUA ACHEBEA man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.
More Chinua Achebe Quotes
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It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us.
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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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Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.
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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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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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Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
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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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I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.
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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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The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.
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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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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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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.
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There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.
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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.
CHINUA ACHEBE






