Quote

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

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
Problem
Recognising
Prescribes
Gender
Rather

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Image
Culture does not make people. People make culture.
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
Privilege blinds, because it's in its nature to blind. Don't let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
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
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 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
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
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 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
Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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
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
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
The only reason race matters is because of racism.
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
When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie