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Culture does not make people. People make culture.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Doe
Make
People
Culture

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
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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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
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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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My grandfather died in the war, my family went through the war, and it affected my parents in really profound ways. I've always wanted to write about that period - in some ways to digest it for myself, something that defined me but that I didn't go through.
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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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
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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
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I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
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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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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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
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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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This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The only reason race matters is because of racism.
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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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
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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie