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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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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Ambition
Girls
Teach
Girl
Flawless
Much
Shrink
Make
Shrinks
Aspire
Smaller
More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The only reason race matters is because of racism.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
To choose to write is to reject silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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