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
Disease
Shapeless
Early
Piercing
Months
Homesickness
Morning
Cement
Desire
Fatigue
Lives
Brief
Living
Imaginary
Soul
Desires
Glints

More quotes by 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 was stained by failure.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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To choose to write is to reject silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in real African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.
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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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
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There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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You deserve to take up space.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I would come, many years later, to understand why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered an important novel, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.
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 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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I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.
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 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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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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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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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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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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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