Quote

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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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 48
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Writing
Mind
Script
Scripts
Inspiring
Follow
Force
Write

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.
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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When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
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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If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I was stained by failure.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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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Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case so it's important to engage with the other Africa.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.
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