Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes - Page 2

The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows.

Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can't we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied - that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

Stories matter. Many stories matter.

She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.

Some people ask: "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general-but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

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

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.

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.

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.

Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye … I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.

I am a person who believes in asking questions, in not conforming for the sake of conforming. I am deeply dissatisfied - about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works - and in some ways, my dissatisfaction drives my storytelling.