Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“To choose to write is to reject silence.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“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 -
“Never ever accept 'Because You Are A Woman' as a reason for doing or not doing anything.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: 'You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.' Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices, always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now, marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support, but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same?”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“I think my first general rule is that most of my experiences are not that interesting. It's usually other people's experiences. It's not that entirely conscious. Somebody tells me a story or, you know, repeats an anecdote that somebody else told them and I just feel like I have to write it down so I don't forget - that means for me, something made it fiction-worthy. Interesting things never happen to me, so maybe two or three times when they do, I have to use them, so I write them down.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“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 -
“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“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.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“There are people who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not crawl, once”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance , insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“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 -
“If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“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 -
“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“The only reason race matters is because of racism.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.””
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?' Aunty Ifeka said. 'Your life belongs to you and you alone.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man”
-- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
“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
