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
Ambition
Girls
Teach
Girl
Flawless
Much
Shrink
Make
Shrinks
Aspire
Smaller

More quotes by 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
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.
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
The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?
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
I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
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
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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
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
Image
When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.
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
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
Image
I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie