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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Recognising
Prescribes
Gender
Rather
Problem

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There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.
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I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
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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.
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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
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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.'
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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.'
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For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.
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One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.
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Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
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Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
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Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
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Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in real African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.
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Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
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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
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That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out
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Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.
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You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man
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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.
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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.
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How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
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