{"author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie","total_quotes":133,"quotes":[{"text":"I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.'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. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.'' 'Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life's choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don't teach boys to do the same?'We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["feminism"],"id":7530,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["poverty","stereotypes"],"id":7782,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.'Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["funny","literature-about-literature","race","race-in-america","race-relations"],"id":11245,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["fiction","jumping-monkey-hill","therapy"],"id":12771,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["belonging","love","safety"],"id":13591,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman's well-being.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["feminism"],"id":19913,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"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?","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["education","fight","oppression","revolution","voice"],"id":34716,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["conditional-equality","feminism","feminism-lite"],"id":35277,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it—you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder. And you want none of that. Don’t deny now. What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad”? I didn’t think so. So you’re black, baby. And here’s the deal with becoming black: You must show that you are offended when such words as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if you don’t know what the hell is being talked about—and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are that you won’t know. (In undergrad a white classmate asks if I like watermelon, I say yes, and another classmate says, Oh my God that is so racist, and I’m confused. “Wait, how?”) You must nod back when a black person nods at you in a heavily white area. It is called the black nod. It is a way for black people to say “You are not alone, I am here too.” In describing black women you admire, always use the word “STRONG” because that is what black women are supposed to be in America. If you are a woman, please do not speak your mind as you are used to doing in your country. Because in America, strong-minded black women are SCARY. And if you are a man, be hyper-mellow, never get too excited, or somebody will worry that you’re about to pull a gun. When you watch television and hear that a “racist slur” was used, you must immediately become offended. Even though you are thinking “But why won’t they tell me exactly what was said?” Even though you would like to be able to decide for yourself how offended to be, or whether to be offended at all, you must nevertheless be very offended. When a crime is reported, pray that it was not committed by a black person, and if it turns out to have been committed by a black person, stay well away from the crime area for weeks, or you might be stopped for fitting the profile. If a black cashier gives poor service to the non-black person in front of you, compliment that person’s shoes or something, to make up for the bad service, because you’re just as guilty for the cashier’s crimes. If you are in an Ivy League college and a Young Republican tells you that you got in only because of Affirmative Action, do not whip out your perfect grades from high school. Instead, gently point out that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are white women. If you go to eat in a restaurant, please tip generously. Otherwise the next black person who comes in will get awful service, because waiters groan when they get a black table. You see, black people have a gene that makes them not tip, so please overpower that gene. If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["america","race"],"id":52336,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"},{"text":"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.","author":"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie","tags":["africa","charity","ted"],"id":52366,"author_id":"Chimamanda+Ngozi+Adichie"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":133,"pages":14,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}