Quote

...there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Early
Piercing
Months
Homesickness
Morning
Cement
Desire
Fatigue
Lives
Brief
Living
Imaginary
Soul
Desires
Glints
Disease
Shapeless

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I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.
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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
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I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.
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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.
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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.
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To choose to write is to reject silence.
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Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
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I was stained by failure.
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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.'
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There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
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The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.
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My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.
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You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
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Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
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If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
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