Top 100 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
#2. 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#3. She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#4. 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#6. Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#7. He did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#8. They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze felt repulsion and longing; he pitied them, but he also imagined being like them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#9. In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meager pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#10. Anger, the tone said, is particularly not good for a woman. If you are a woman, you are not supposed to express anger, because it is threatening.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#11. Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#12. Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#13. Let her know that there are many individuals and many cultures that do not find the narrow mainstream definition of beauty attractive.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#14. If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#15. It is easy to say, 'But women can just say no to all this.' But the reality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#16. He was now a husband and father, and they had not been in touch in years, yet she could not pretend that he was not a part of her homesickness, or that she did not often think of him, sifting through their past, looking for portents of what she could not name.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#18. ...parents unconsciously start very early to teach girls how to be, that baby girls are given less room and more rules and baby boys more room and fewer rules.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#19. Don't see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#20. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#21. Ifemelu thought about the expression "sweet girl." Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#22. But if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#23. To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#24. Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#25. A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn't married, we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#26. I think love is the most important thing in life. Whatever kind, however you define it, but I think of it generally as being greatly valued by another human being and greatly valuing another human being.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#28. And felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#29. Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#30. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that... Marlene Sanders... once gave this piece of advice to a younger journalist: "Never apologize for working. You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to give to your child.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#33. course it was angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#34. Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#39. It's strange how I have felt, with every major event that has occurred in my life, that you were the only person who would understand.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#40. The most unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things. The
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#41. While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#42. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#44. Brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#45. I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#46. 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#47. So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men. Of
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#48. 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
#49. If we keep seeing only men as heads of corporations, it starts to seem "natural" that only men should be heads of corporations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#50. He turned to her and said, "About time," when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#51. His mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be. He
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#52. There is so much that is still silent between Jaja and me. Perhaps we will talk more with time, or perhaps we never will be able to say it all, to clothe things in words, things that have long been naked.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#53. In particular I want to talk about natural black hair, and how it's not just hair. I mean, I'm interested in hair in sort of a very aesthetic way, just the beauty of hair, but also in a political way: what it says, what it means.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#54. If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#55. You know it was love at first sight for both of us," he said.
"For both of us? Is it by force? Why are you speaking for me?"
"I'm just stating a fact. Stop struggling."
...
"Yes, it's a fact," she said.
"What?"
"I love you.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#56. The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#57. I have my father's lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddy's girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasn't crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my father's.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#60. I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#61. Talk to her about sex, and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward, but it is necessary.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#63. Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes I think from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self worth is diminished if they are not [naturally] in charge.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#64. Race is totally overhyped these days, black people need to get over themselves, it's all about class now, the haves and the have-nots,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#65. Too much schooling ruins a woman; everyone knows that. It gives a woman a big head and she will start to insult her husband. What kind of wife will that be?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#66. She had not thought of them as "fat," though. She had thought of them as "big," because one of the first things her friend Ginika told her was that "fat" in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgment like "stupid" or "bastard," and not a mere description like "short" or "tall.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#67. Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick. It
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#69. He thought the police would have to do better; everyone knew the cult boys had more modern guns
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#70. But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#71. That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#74. It is not hard," Ifemelu said firmly. "You are using the wrong comb." And she pulled the comb from Aisha's hand and put it down on the table.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#75. Try listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it's not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#76. 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
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#78. He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#79. I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#80. 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
#81. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#82. On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#83. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about our sons' girlfriends, but our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. But of course when the time is right, we expect those girls to bring back the perfect man to be their husband.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#84. He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#86. Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#89. There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#90. The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#91. It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#92. Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being? This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#93. 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
#94. I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#95. Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#96. How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told - are really dependent on power.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#97. Perhaps he was not a true writer after all. He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#100. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn't matter when you're alone together because it's just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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