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“To me, being an intellectual doesn't mean knowing about intellectual issues; it means taking pleasure in them.”

“People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”

“You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.”

“The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”

“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.”

“There is no story that is not true, […] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”

“If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’
If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’
But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.”

“If you don't like my story, write your own”

“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

“Nobody can teach me who I am.”

“Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!”

“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.”

“People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.”

“Charity… is the opium of the privileged.”

“There is no story that is not true.”

“My weapon is literature”

“One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”

“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.”

“When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”

“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.”

“A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk.”

“The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”

“When there is a big tree small ones climb on its back to reach the sun.”

“Chielo, the priestess of Agbala, called the converts the excrement of the clan, and the new faith was a mad dog that had come to eat it up.”

“We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb"He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.”

“Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.”

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

“A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.”

“… when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.”