Ifemelu Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#3. Ifemelu was looking forward to being away from home, to the independence of owning her own time.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#4. He said, 'Ifemelu is a fine babe bu she is too much trouble. She can argue. She can talk. She never agrees. But Ginika is just a sweet gil.' He paused, then added, He didn't know that was exactly what I hoped to hear, I'm not interested in girls that are too nice

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#5. Ifemelu sensed that the magazine was a hobby for Aunty Onenu, a hobby that meant something, but still a hobby. Not a passion. Not something that consumed her.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#6. I will advise you to wait until you are at least in the university, wait until you own yourself a little more. Do you understand?"
"Yes," Ifemelu said. She did not know what "own yourself a little more" meant.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#7. 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

#8. Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#9. Just give her one, Ifemelu thought. To overwhelm a child of four with choices, to lay on her the burden of making a decision, was to deprive her of the bliss of childhood. Adulthood, after all, already loomed, where she would have to make grimmer and grimmer decisions.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#10. Ifemelu margined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#11. Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#12. They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#17. The thorny path bears some of the sweetest flowers that adorn life. And when with naked, bleeding feet we walk upon a flinty soil, we often find diamonds.

Elizabeth Prentiss

#18. Don't judge us too harshly - or not, at least, till you have taken the trouble to learn our point of view. You consider the individual - we think only of the family.

Edith Wharton

#19. All of this wisdom belongs to us. It doesn't belong to experts or professional scholars or people who spend their days reading books. It belongs to any one of us who is willing to go out and get it.

Eric Greitens

#20. There is no 'as far as possible' on the question of untouchability. If it is to go, it must go in its entirety from the temples as from everywhere else.

Mahatma Gandhi

#21. Pain is unavoidable. It comes in many different ways for many different reasons.

R.J. Lewis

#22. She liked it best when he read the X-Men, even though she didn't get everything that was going on there; the X-Men were worse than General Hospital.

Rainbow Rowell

#23. She smiled a smile to bring a thousand ships to harbor.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#24. Don't let the things you can't do get in the way of the things you can.

John Wooden

#25. It was a sweet display of self-confidence, as he no longer felt the need to entertain me or to advertise his claim on my attentions. It goes to show that even a man who craves constant approval can attain self-assurance through a little hanky-panky.

Amor Towles

#26. I am a fan of movies and there is something about watching film that is burned into celluloid for all time that is now a piece of history. You go watch, being a fan of classic films and my children and their children are going to be watching these movies.

Edward Zwick

#27. I have more to say than Hemingway, and God knows, I say it better than Faulkner.

Carson McCullers

#28. He [Donald Trump] is been bold. He's been bold on building a wall.

Jeff Sessions