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

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
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To choose to write is to reject silence.
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This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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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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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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Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.
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Culture does not make people. People make culture.
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