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The only reason race matters is because of racism.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Racism
Matters
Race
Reason
Matter

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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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
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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
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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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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
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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
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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
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Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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
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Culture does not make people. People make culture.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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...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
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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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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At some point I was a HappyAfricanFeminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
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
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie