QuoteProject
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.
Chinua Achebe
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Storytellers shape our identities and histories through their narratives.

This quote by Chinua Achebe emphasizes the profound role of storytellers in shaping our understanding of identity and history. Storytellers not only convey events and experiences but also imbue them with significance, allowing survivors and future generations to derive meaning from their past. Without these narratives, the experiences of survival and the lessons learned would lack context and importance, illustrating the essential human need for storytelling in understanding our existence.

Themes

StorytellingIdentityHistoryMemoryMeaning

In practice

Example use cases

In a graduation speech, to inspire students to appreciate their own narratives.

More from Chinua Achebe

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.
Chinua AchebeRead
Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Chinua AchebeRead
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.
Chinua AchebeRead
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.
Chinua AchebeRead
An angry man is always a stupid man.
Chinua AchebeRead
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
Chinua AchebeRead

Similar quotes

With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
Henry Van DykeRead
We must mirror God's love in the midst of a world full of hatred. We are the mirrrors of God's love, so we may show Jesus by our lives
Corrie Ten BoomRead
Great occasions rouse even the lowest of human beings to some kind of greatness, but he alone is the really great man whose character is great always, the same wherever he be.
Swami VivekanandaRead
Veganism is the application of the principle of abolition in your own life; it represents your recognition that animals are not things. Veganism is the recognition of the moral personhood of nonhuman animals.
Gary L. FrancioneRead
If we cannot make a profit, that means we are committing a sort of crime against society. We take society's capital, we take their people, we take their materials, yet without a good profit, we are using precious resources that could be better used elsewhere.
Konosuke MatsushitaRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.