Quote

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 48
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Thinking
Obvious
Mistake
Everyone
Often
Else
Something
Make

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Image
Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
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
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
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
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
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
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.
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
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
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
You deserve to take up space.
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
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.
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