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Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Cling
Shaped
Come
Histories

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.
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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I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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You deserve to take up space.
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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Privilege blinds, because it's in its nature to blind. Don't let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.
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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Your life belongs to you and you alone.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.
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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At some point I was a HappyAfricanFeminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.
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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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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We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The idea that sex is something a woman gives a man, and she loses something when she does that, which again for me is nonsense. I want us to raise girls differently where boys and girls start to see sexuality as something that they own, rather than something that a boy takes from a girl.
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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Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie