The relationship with my people, the Nigerian people, is very good. My relationship with the rulers has always been problematic.
Interpretation
Cherishing connections with the populace while grappling with governance challenges.
Chinua Achebe highlights the distinction between his connection with the Nigerian people and the often fraught interactions with those in power. This suggests that personal relationships thrive on understanding and trust, while political relationships can be marred by conflict and dissonance.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about community engagement and political trust.
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.
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Mr. Brown had thought of nothing but numbers. He should have known that the kingdom of God did not depend on large crowds. Our Lord Himself stressed the importance of fewness. Narrow is the way and few the number. To fill the Lord's holy temple with an idolatrous crowd clamoring for signs was a folly of everlasting consequence. Our Lord used the whip only once in His life - to drive the crowd away from His church.
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.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice. Being part of that dialogue meant not only sitting at the table but effectively telling the African story from an African perspective - in full earshot of the world.
An angry man is always a stupid man.
But it's amazing how many people think that gay men should slink off into the shadows when it comes to having friendships with children.
Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.
Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.
It is more important to know the person who has the condition than it is to know the condition the person has.
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