Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of African's brilliant minds in 'literasphere'. She is a short story and non fiction writer and has written several books and gained worldwide recognition for her works. She is of the opinion that women should be given equal rights as men and should occupy top and key positions which over the years have been designated fit for only men. She is indeed a powerful writer and her works are straight from the heart as she loves to speak her mind always. Below are sixty nine(69) outburst quotes credited to Chimamanda Ngozi Adochie.
QUOTES:
"Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign"
"Stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people and can also repair the broken dignity"
"The single story creates stereotypes and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete and make one story become the only story"
"If you should follow the media, you did think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that is not the case; so it is important to engage with the other Africa"
"I am not worried about about intimidating men"
"The type of man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in"
"Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become"
"Culture does not make people, people make culture"
"My own definition of 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"
"All of us, women and men must do better"
"Racism should never have happened and so you do not get a cookie for reducing it"
"If I were not Africa, 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"
"While Africa nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voice"
"The manifestation of racism have changed but the language have not"
"Marriage can be a source of joy, love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we do not teach boys the same"
"The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine- they have something to say and are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at the center"
"Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylized recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character, emotion and story as fiction is"
"Lasting love have to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person"
"I am a person who believe in asking questions and not conforming for the sake of conforming"
"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"
"What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. Its not that simple"
"I look young, I heard this said so often and it became irritating. I once worked as a babysitter for a woman who, the first time we met, said she did not want somebody in high school. I was 22 and later I realized that in certain places, being female and looking young meant it was more difficult to be taken seriously, so I turned to makeup"
"I want to talk about natural black hair and how its not just hair. I mean, I am interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but also in a political way- what it says and what it means"
"I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S"
"I think that I am ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian and that is home- my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America and like that I can spend time in America"
"I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland and Lagos, Nigeria"
"There have always been a dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria"
"No sweetness here', is the kind of old fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should"
"I own things that I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way"
"I am just a Nigeria who is comfortable in other places"
"I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else"
"Our history cling to us as we are shaped by where we come from"
"I think you travel to search and come back home to find yourself there"
"We do not mind repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet. We also risk being myopic about our present"
"To chose to write is to reject silence"
"We teach girls to shrink themselves and 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"
"All over the world, girls are raised to make themselves likeable and to twist themselves into shapes that suit other people"
"Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is not married, 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"
"The idea that sex is something a woman gives to 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 starts to see sexuality as something that they own rather than something that a boy takes from a girl"
"This was love, a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracle"
"All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not be, in order to attract and please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women"
"I have many problems in my life but I do not think that identity is one of them"
"When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise"
"Power is the ability to not only tell the story of another person but to make it the definitive story of that person"
"The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be instead of recognizing how we are"
"You Americans are always peering under people's beds to look for communism"
"I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better"
""She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs"
"She rested her head against his and felt for the first time what she would often feel with him - self affection"
"I can write with authority only about what I know well"
"There was cement in her soul, it has been there for a while"
"Her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out"
"The educated ones leave; the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle, who will break that cycle?"
"At some point, I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men and who likes lip gloss and wears high heels for herself but not for men"
"I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else"
"I was stained by failure"
"My grandfather died in the war and my family went through the war and it affected my parents in really profound ways"
"If the government does not fund education, which they don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school"
"The higher you go, the fewer women there are"
"About 52% of the world population is female, but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men"
'The late Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said 'the higher you go, the fewer women there are"
"I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria, it always will be"
'Race does not really exist for you because it has never been a barrier"
"Americans thinks that African writers will write about the exotic, wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations"
"How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined"
"People have crushes on priests all the time"
"In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past"
Stories and many stories matter"
"I heard people read it early on and you know, well meaning people said to me 'you should take out the blogs'. I did not get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me; it was sort of like a 'tone it down and make it easier to swallow' kind of thing. I just thought if I do that then it is not the book I want to write"
"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"
