Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Would
Imagine
Prescribes
Rather
Freer
Individual
Selves
True
Recognizing
Didn
Happier
Problem
Gender
Self
Expectations
Much
Weight

More quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Image
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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
To choose to write is to reject silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
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