每日一句：I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples. 

Mother Teresa

演講名稱：The danger of a single story

演講者：Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

01:25

And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.

01:32

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available,and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

02:03

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate,whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

02:24

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.