Quote

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

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
People
Culture
Doe
Make

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Image
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
Image
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
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
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.
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
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
Image
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.
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
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
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 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
Image
...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
Image
The only reason race matters is because of racism.
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
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
Image
I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.
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 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