Quote

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Used
Empower
Matter
Empowering
Many
Brilliant
People
Dignity
Broken
Dispossess
Break
Malign
Stories
Humanize
Also
Repair

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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To choose to write is to reject silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Culture does not make people. People make culture.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Honesty. And I just really think there's a fundamental friendship that needs to exist, whether it's a lover, whether it's a sister...there's just this connection both people need to be effortlessly themselves.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Culture does not make people - people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. [...] A feminist is a man or a woman who says, 'yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.'
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I don't believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie