Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

Often, women as little girls are sent off on a track for them to live a perfect life and be a perfect woman. Not for boys, who can be themselves with their mood and their temper.

People try to make women a very specific thing so that we like them.

To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn't have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

So sometime the expectation of the female by a high expectation. Because peoples think that female were weak in term of, like, of the physically and compared to the men.

There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.

I think there are a lot of rules for women. We have a lot of expectations and a lot of rules for women. So we're expected to march in a straight line, and when we don't, all hell breaks loose.

Women are often expected to be more amiable or more pleasing or more submissive than men generally.

I don't like this idea of division: that if you're a clever woman then you've got to be a particular way. Because men don't. Men please themselves.

When we get married or interviewed for a job or play professional sports or run for president of the United States, we encounter a whole set of standards and expectations. We can be shamed for an outfit that's too slutty, too dowdy, too pricey--take your pick. That's the burden women carry into the fitting room.

There are certain expectations placed on writers if other people have put a value on their gender. I'm aware of the hundreds of tiny differences that happen when people are seeing your gender before they see something else.

As a woman, this is one of these areas where you have to walk a fine line: the classic, 'Are you soft and squishy, and you hug everybody, and you're a cheerleader?' versus, 'Are you the hard-nosed you-know-what female dog?'

A girl should think about making herself look attractive so she can get a good husband later on. Looks is more important than books, Miss Hunky..." "The name is Honey," Miss Honey said. "Now look at me," Mrs Wormwood said. "Then look at you. You chose books. I chose looks.

Never expect women to be sincere, so long as they are educated to think that their first aim in life is to please.

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

There is a certain expectation of girls to eventually grow up and behave and fall in line. I've always bucked against that.

The students were staring at her in the manner of those who have heard of the species 'female' but have never expected to get this close to one.

. . . women were brought up to have only one set of manners. A woman was either a lady or she wasn't, and we all know what the latter meant. Not even momentary lapses were allowed; there is no female equivalent of the boys-will-be-boys concept.

Women have one great advantage over men. It is commonly thought that if they marry they have done enough, and need career no further. If a man marries, on the other hand, public opinion is all against him if he takes this view.

Women have choices, and men have responsibilities.

If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

Men are more likely to be introverted than women are, but it's really very slight. But the real difference I think is in how it plays out, how it relates to cultural stereotypes.

A woman can never be too rich or too thin, but until very, very recently, she could be too powerful, for which - if she wasn't smart enough to camouflage herself - she generally paid the price.

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society.