Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes & Sayings

I had people read it early on and, you know, well-meaning people said to me, you should take out the blogs. I didn't get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me - it was sort of like a "tone it down, make it easier to swallow" kind of thing. And I just thought if I do that then it's not the book I want to write. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right." The — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They had both wanted it to happen and they both wished it had not; what mattered now was that nobody else should ever know. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say." He said something similar now: "Excuses don't win a game. You should try strategy. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

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. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. They never said, "I don't know." They said, instead, "I'm not sure," which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge. They avoided giving direct instructions: they did not say "Ask somebody upstairs"; they said "You might want to ask somebody upstairs." When you tripped and fell, when you choked, when misfortune befell you, they did not say, "Sorry." They said "Are you okay?" when it was obvious that you were not. And when you said "Sorry" to them when they choked or tripped or encountered misfortune, they replied, eyes wide with surprise, "Oh, it's not your fault. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am an agnostic respecter of religion. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

You know America has a way of turning everything into an illness that needs medicine. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don't teach boys to do the same? I — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Maybe it's time to just scrap the word "racist." Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Oh, my God,' she said, between sobs. 'Oh, my God.'
Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna's grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo's house. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Did not talk to people, they instead talked at people, — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Once she had told him, "The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place," and it pleased him to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. They were from the same place and they still had a lot to say to each other. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Isn't it odd that in most societies in the world today, women generally cannot propose marriage? Marriage is such a major step in your life, and yet you cannot take charge of it; it depends on a man asking you. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In America, you don't get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We have fried chicken in common? Do you realize how loaded fried chicken is as a metaphor here? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Those girls, I was waiting for the to bring out their hands and beg you to shit so they could worship that too. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I realized that if I ever have children, I don't want them to have American childhoods. I don't want them to say 'Hi' to adults I want them to say 'Good morning' and 'Good afternoon'. I don't want them to mumble 'Good' when someone says 'How are you?' to them. Or to raise five fingers when asked how old they are. I want them to say 'I'm fine thank you' and 'I'm five years old'. I don't want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. Is that terribly conservative? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We teach girls to be likeable, to be nice, to be false. And we do not teach boys the same. This is dangerous. Many sexual predators have capitalized on this. Many girls remain silent when abused because they want to be nice. Many girls spend too much time trying to be "nice" to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the "feelings" of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability. 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. So — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The only reason race matters is because of racism. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol - in small amounts. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He realized that what he wanted most of all, with her, was time. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss, a great burden hurtling towards her, and she wished she could duck, lower herself so that it would bypass her, so that she would save herself. Love was a kind of grief. This was what the novelists meant by suffering. She had often thought it a little silly, the idea of suffering for love, but now she understood. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You look like a black American was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A quickening inside her, a dawning. She realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don't teach boys to care about being likable. 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. 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. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She was struck by how mostly slim white people got off at the stops in Manhattan and, as the train went further into Brooklyn, the people left were mostly black and fat. 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 judgement like "stupid" or "bastard," and not a mere description like "short" or "tall." So she had banished "fat" from her vocabulary. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In America, tribalism is alive and well. There are four kinds - class, ideology, region, and race. First, class. Pretty easy. Rich folk and poor folk. Second, ideology. Liberals and conservatives. They don't merely disagree on political issues, each side believes the other is evil. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu would come to realize later that Kimberly used "beautiful" in a peculiar way. "I'm meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school," Kimberly would say, or "We're working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project," and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

How did they know when to laugh? What to laugh about? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, 'It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Of course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: you hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don't wear make-up, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humour, you don't use deodorant. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

'No Sweetness Here' is the kind of old-fashioned social realism I have always been drawn to in fiction, and it does what I think all good literature should: It entertains you. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

Are you kidding me?' Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga style on the floor. 'You can't write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it'll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race ... ' p.335 — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They agreed, without any prodding, without the shadows of obligation or compromise, on Barack Obama. At first, even though she wished America would elect a black man as president, she thought it impossible, and she could not imagine Obama as president of the United States; he seemed too slight, too skinny, a man who would be blown away by the wind. Hillary Clinton was sturdier. Ifemelu liked to watch Clinton on television, in her square trouser suits, her face a mask of resolve, her prettiness disguised, because that was the only way to convince the world that she was able. Ifemelu — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe ... I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It's so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You can't even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bristling with half-baked knowledge from the books we had read. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They never said "I don't know." They said, instead, "I'm not sure," which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "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. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?") — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He was out playing and heard Molly calling him. "Richard! Supper!" Instead of answering "Coming!" and running to her, he dodged under a hedge, scraping his knees. "Richard! Richard!" Molly sounded frantic this time, but he remained silent, crouched. "Richard! Where are you, Dicky?" A rabbit stopped and watched him, and he locked eyes with the rabbit and, for those short moments, only he and the rabbit knew where he was. Then the rabbit leaped out and Molly peered under the bushes and saw him. She smacked him. She told him to stay in his room for the rest of the day. She said she was very upset and would tell Mr. and Mrs. Churchill. But those short moments had made it all worthwhile, those moments of pure plenary abandon, when he felt as if he, and he alone, were in control of the universe of his childhood. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Greatness depends on where you are coming from. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

They said "soon" to each other often, and "soon" gave their plan the weight of something real. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoid about 'Lagos girls,' those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

She was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Let's have a child," he said again. "A little girl just like you, and we will call her Obianuju because she will complete us. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Said. "I'm fine. I have a granola bar," Ifemelu said. She had some baby carrots in a Ziploc, too, although all she had snacked on so far was her melted chocolate. "What bar?" Aisha asked. Ifemelu showed her the bar, organic, one hundred percent whole grain with real fruit. "That not food!" Halima scoffed, looking away from the television. "She here fifteen years, Halima," Aisha said, as if the length of years in America explained Ifemelu's eating of a granola bar. "Fifteen? Long time," Halima said. Aisha waited until Mariama left before pulling out her cell phone from her pocket. "Sorry, I make quick call," she said, and stepped outside. Her face had brightened when — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Okay, babe, okay, I didn't mean for it to be such a big deal, he said. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money. One day, after — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The urge to be contrarian was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of the person she feared she had become. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She had taught her son the ability to be, even in the middle of a crowd, somehow comfortably inside himself. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie