Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Aspire
Smaller
Ambition
Girls
Teach
Girl
Flawless
Much
Shrink
Make
Shrinks

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Image
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Culture does not make people. People make culture.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Your life belongs to you and you alone.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
When I'm in a good mood I like to cook. But I don't like saying it in public because I find myself being resentful of the idea Now you will make a good wife. You can cook, right? So when people ask me I go, No, I don't like cooking!
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie