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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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The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.
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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.
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Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
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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.
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Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
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There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.
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In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.
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I was stained by failure.
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We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.
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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.
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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!
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You deserve to take up space.
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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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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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Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.
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The higher you go, the fewer women there are.
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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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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.
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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
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There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
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