Top 100 Chimamanda Quotes
#1. My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.
Chris Abani
#2. When Philip complained about the French couple building a house next to his in Cornwall, Emenike asked, 'Are they between you and the sunset?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#3. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#5. At first Ifemelu thought Kimberly's apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly's repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#7. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#8. The problem with looking in the mirror is that you never know how you will feel about what you see. Sometimes, when my hormones are out of sync, I have no interest in the mirror, and if I do look I think everything is all wrong. Other times, I am quite pleased with what I see.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#9. Everything is about them now." "One day they will be grown and leave home and you will just be a source of embarrassment or exasperation for them and they won't take your phone calls or won't call you for weeks,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#10. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#11. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#12. 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
#15. I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#17. Surrounded by students who were all folded easily on their seats, all flush with knowledge, not of the subject of the classes, but of how to be in the classes
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#18. There was a part of him (her) that dreamed, and he (she) was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#19. I am a person who believes in asking questions, in not conforming for the sake of conforming. I am deeply dissatisfied - about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works - and in some ways, my dissatisfaction drives my storytelling.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#24. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#25. We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#27. There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#28. You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#29. I had examined him that day, too, looking away when his eyes met mine, for signs of difference, of godlessness. I didn't see any, but I was sure they were there somewhere. They had to be.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#30. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#32. She is one of those black people who want to be the only black person in the room, so any other black person is an immediate threat to her.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#34. Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#35. I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#36. ...a Nigerian couple visiting from Maryland, their two boys sitting next to them on the sofa, both buttoned-up and stiff, caged in the airlessness of their parents' immigrant aspirations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#37. He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgement of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. 'Yes, I see what you mean,' he said often.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#38. I don't believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#43. Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#44. You make me shy," he said.
"Are you serious? Because you make me shy."
"I don't believe anything makes you shy," he said.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. We watch films in class," she told Obinze. "They talk about films here as if films are as important as books. So we watch films and then we write a response paper and almost everybody gets an A. Can you imagine? These Americans are not serious
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#50. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#54. 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
#56. She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#57. Michael's a good cat but he tries so hard to keep it real that he can seem full of negativity,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#58. Please don't speak Igbo to him,' Aunty Uju said. 'Two languages will confuse him.'
'What are you talking about, Aunty? We spoke two languages growing up.'
'This is America. It's different.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#59. 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
#60. Some people will say a woman is subordinate to men because its our culture. But culture is constantly changing ... culture does not make people, people makes culture.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#61. Hair away from her face, as though one hand could not possibly tame all that hair. "How nice to meet you," she said to Ifemelu, smiling, as they shook hands, her hand small,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#63. He had discovered that grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#64. What does it mean to know? Really? Is it knowing-her refusal to think concretely about other women? Her refusal to ever consider the possibility?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#65. Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let's really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you or you might see the real woman of your dreams and leave me.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#66. Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#68. Because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye ... 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#70. ...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
#71. 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
#72. Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#73. We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak
a hard man,
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#74. He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more than the average salary plus stock options because they were desperately trying to look diverse.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#75. what I hope for Chizalum is this: that she will be full of opinions, and that her opinions will come from an informed, humane and broad-minded place.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#76. You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?" Aunty Ifeka said. "Your life belongs to you and you alone.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#77. My greatest vanity is my skin. It is the colour of gingerbread and, thanks to my mother's genes, smooth and mostly blemish-free.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#78. 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. She had taught her son the ability to be, even in the middle of a crowd, somehow comfortably inside himself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#83. Her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#84. But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called 'participation,' and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#85. 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
#86. Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#88. 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
#89. She cannot remember when her idea of God has not been cloudy, like the reflection from a steamy bathroom mirror, and she cannot remember ever trying to clean the mirror.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#91. Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#93. Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#94. Was shaking his head sadly as he spoke - was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#95. 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
#96. You know who really killed Lumumba?" Master said, looking up from a magazine. "It was the Americans and the Belgians. It had nothing to do with Katanga.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#97. When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#98. 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
#100. Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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