Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!
Interpretation
Writers often provoke thought and reflection rather than providing clear solutions.
This quote by Chinua Achebe highlights the idea that literature and writing do not serve to offer easy answers or straightforward guidance. Instead, writers stimulate critical thinking and may present complex ideas that can be challenging and even frustrating to digest, much like a headache. Achebe suggests that the true role of writers is to provoke thought and inspire their readers to engage deeply with the material, even if it leads to discomfort.
In practice
In a literary discussion, this quote can be used to emphasize the provocative nature of great literature.
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.
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.
Privilege, you see, is one of the great adversaries of the imagination; it spreads a thick layer of adipose tissue over our sensitivity.
When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.
My hunch is that if we allow ourselves to give who we really are to the children in our care, we will in some way inspire cartwheels in their hearts.
Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.
Service-learning is a particularly fertile way of involving young people in community service, because it ties helping others to what they are learning in the classroom. It enables them to apply academic disciplines to practical, everyday problems. In the process, it provides a compelling answer to the adolescent's perennial question, 'Why do I need to learn this stuff?
In our country today, very few children are raised to believe that their principal destiny is to serve their family, their country, or God.
From now on I hope always to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.
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