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
Much
Weight
Would
Imagine
Prescribes
Rather
Freer
Individual
Selves
True
Recognizing
Didn
Happier
Problem
Gender
Self
Expectations

More quotes by 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
I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.
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
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
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
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
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
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
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
Image
I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
Culture does not make people. People make culture.
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
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
Image
I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Image
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
Image
You deserve to take up space.
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
Image
Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.
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
The only reason race matters is because of racism.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie