Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: To choose to write is to reject silence.

Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

where-we-come

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

couple sometimes watches

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

obvious mistake thinking

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

daughter husband girl

People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

rivals crush people

Culture does not make people - people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. [...] 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. We must do better.'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

feminist men people

About 52% of the world's 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.'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

position-of-power population men

They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

heartbroken stupidity desire

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

games summer years

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

fighting beautiful war

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

details stories fiction

Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

white-man writing men

I didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

love-you writing thinking

This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

our-world land people

Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

flower tea people

Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

mutual-support choices mind

I had people read it early on and, you know, well-meaning people said to me, you should take out the blogs. I didn't get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me - it was sort of like a "tone it down, make it easier to swallow" kind of thing. And I just thought if I do that then it's not the book I want to write.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

writing book people

Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

asks novel people

Your life belongs to you and you alone.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

feeling-stuck yellow-sun

In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't lynched somebody then you can't be called a racist. If you're not a bloodsucking monster, then you can't be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

rights mean past