Privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.
All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.
I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.
The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.
I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.
There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
Culture does not make people. People make culture.
She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.
She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.
I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.
You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man.