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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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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Writing
Collectors
Life
Dialogue
Record
Records
Bits
Write
Unrepentant
Stories
Overheard
Real
Collector

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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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
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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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He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.
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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You deserve to take up space.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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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I would come, many years later, to understand why To Kill A Mockingbird is considered an important novel, but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.
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
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Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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The idea that sex is something a woman gives a man, and she loses something when she does that, which again for me is nonsense. I want us to raise girls differently where boys and girls start to see sexuality as something that they own, rather than something that a boy takes from a girl.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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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
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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
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Culture does not make people. People make culture.
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 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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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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Honesty. And I just really think there's a fundamental friendship that needs to exist, whether it's a lover, whether it's a sister...there's just this connection both people need to be effortlessly themselves.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie