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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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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: January 1
Feminist
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Struck
Discovering
Poverty
Came
American
Things

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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.
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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.
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There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
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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.
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Culture does not make people - people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. [...] A feminist is a man or a woman who says, 'yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.'
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Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
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...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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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Why did people ask What is it about? as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
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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
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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
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There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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To choose to write is to reject silence.
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Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.
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You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.
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If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.
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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