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" Nobody just leaves medical school, especially given it's fiercely competitive to get in. But I had a sister who was a doctor, another who was a pharmacist, a brother who was an engineer. So my parents already had sensible children who would be able to make an actual living, and I think they felt comfortable sacrificing their one strange child. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Sister

School

" 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

Childhood

Summer

Trees

" 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. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Gender

You

People

" Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Women

Thinking

Problems

" When I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother. "

" Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Tolerable

Purged

Evil

" 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

Start

Say

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Movement

Make

" 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

Childhood

Curious

Nostalgia

" A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running. "

" 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

Story

Character

Experience

" I think I'm ridiculously fortunate. I consider myself a Nigerian - that's home; my sensibility is Nigerian. But I like America, and I like that I can spend time in America. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Think

Myself

" 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

Gender

Culture

Story

" Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor. "

" Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical. "

" Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died. "

" It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

American

Media

People

" Developments in medical technology have long been confined to procedural or pharmaceutical advances, while neglecting a most basic and essential component of medicine: patient information management. "

" I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Home

World

Myself

" Patients who are being kept alive by technology and want to end their lives already have a recognized constitutional right to stop any and all medical interventions, from respirators to antibiotics. They do not need physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. "

" Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self - to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Struggle

Self

Think

" I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Need

People

Think

" 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

I Am

Relationships

Respect

" 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

Easy

Eat

Gender

" 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

You

Myself

Know

" Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Good

Medicine

You

" 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

Failure

People

" A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant. "

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Angry

Medical

Wise

" 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

Child

Happy

Back

" I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable. "

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I Am

Insecurity

Women