Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

I think the Left doesn't know how to be a tribe in the way the Right does. The Left is very cannibalistic. It eats its own.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What I find problematic is the suggestion that when, say, Madonna adopts an African child, she is saving Africa. It's not that simple. You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think the Left doesn't know how to be a tribe in the way the Right does. The Left is very cannibalistic. It eats its own.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think it's possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that's a bad thing for society.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There can be an extremist idea of purity. It's so easy to fall afoul of the ridiculously high standard set there.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The problem with looking in the mirror is that you never know how you will feel about what you see. Sometimes, when my hormones are out of sync, I have no interest in the mirror, and if I do look I think everything is all wrong. Other times, I am quite pleased with what I see.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I don't think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women because I don't think that's true.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If I were not African, 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. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think the history of western feminism is one that is fraught with racism, and I think it's important to acknowledge that and, at the same time, to say that feminism is not the western invention, that my great-grandmother in what is now south-western Nigeria is feminist.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My greatest vanity is my skin. It is the colour of gingerbread and, thanks to my mother's genes, smooth and mostly blemish-free.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From the very beginning, I think it's been quite clear that there's no way I could possibly say that trans women are not women. It's the sort of thing to me that's obvious, so I start from that obvious premise.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think white women need to wake up and say, 'Not all women are white,' three times in front of the mirror.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You know, I don't think of myself as anything like a 'global citizen' or anything of the sort. I am just a Nigerian who's comfortable in other places.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I have my father's lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddy's girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasn't crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my father's.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I find that women... deal with immigration differently. And I'm interested in that.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie