Chinua Achebe Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“There is no story that is not true.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Stories
“Become familiar with your home, but know also about your neighbors. The young man who never went anywhere thinks his mother is the greatest cook.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Mother #Home #Men
“There is that great proverb â€” that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Hunters #Lions #Historian
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Who I Am #Thought Provoking #Needs
“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 Achebe

#Moving #Giving #Black History
“Nobody can teach me who I am.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Who I Am #Teach
“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.'”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Humanity #Mud #Practicals
“The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Shining #Sun
“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Integrity #Stupid #Reality
“Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Art #Reality #Men
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Art #Oil #Conversation
“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Writing #People #Stories
“The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Tree #Lizards #Praise
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Party #Champion #Church
“Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Imagination #Tissues #Layers
“There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Thinking #Allies #Moral
“It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Men #Doe #Cactus
“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Home #Moon #Men
“As long as one people sit on another and are deaf to their cry, so long will understanding and peace elude all of us.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Long #People #Justice
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Rising Up #People #Water
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Simple #People #World
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Real #Lying #Compassion
“A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Running #Doe #Toads
“An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Dry #Bones #Old Woman
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#People #Different #Stories
“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Humanity
“Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Tasks #Generations #Embrace
“If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Understanding #Stories #Sides
“The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Responsibility #Air #Land
“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.”
-- Chinua Achebe

#Men #Thinking #Thought Provoking

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