Adichie Quotes & Sayings
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Top Adichie Quotes
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
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
We say to girls: You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him. But — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, — 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
The Red Cross irritated Ugwu; the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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 makeup, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humor, you don't use deodorant. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She looked away, worried that the crush of emotions she had felt while he was speaking would now converge on her face. "Of course you don't. You like your life," she said. "I live my life." "Oh, how mysterious we are. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
loping, comfortable gait pulled my eyes and held them. I turned and dashed into the flat. I could see the front yard — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You know, you're a feminist." It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone - the same tone with which a person would say, "You're a supporter of terrorism. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more time and a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with things, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue's memory. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Bristling with half-baked knowledge from the books we had read. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you'll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You'll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist. And — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
He wanted to know about day-to-day life in America, what people ate and what consumed them, what shamed them and what attracted them, but he read novel after novel and was disappointed: — 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
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
What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not "the boy has to pay," but rather, "whoever has more should pay. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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
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
You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If you're telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don't complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don't even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We are very ideological about fiction in this country. If a character is not familiar, then that character becomes unbelievable. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You deserve to take up space. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Whenever she felt besieged by doubts, she would think of herself as standing valiantly alone, as almost heroic, so as to squash her uncertainty. — 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
Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men - cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was going to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world - who are given the fancy title of "chef" - are men. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Her friend is having a party, this Russian girl, they became friends because they have the same violin tutor. The first time I met the girl's mother, I think she was wearing something illegal, like the fur of an extinct animal, and she was trying to pretend that she did not have a Russian accent, being more British than the British! — 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
I find that women ... deal with immigration differently. And I'm interested in that. — 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
...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
Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don't think like that. I don't even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
Later, when she came to know of the letters he wrote to Congress about Darfur, the teenagers he tutored at the high school on Dixwell, the shelter he volunteered at, she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine but had, instead, a firm reed of goodness. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
It was a tiny moment, brief and fleeting, but Olanna noticed how scrupulously they avoided any contact, any touch of skin, as if they were united by a common knowledge so monumental that they were determined not to be united by anything else. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. I wore a very serious, very manly, and very ugly suit. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This was love, to be eager for tomorrow. — 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
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
Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued; — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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
It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there. — 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
It's 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. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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
You can have ambition
But not too much
You should aim to be successful
But not too successful
Otherwise you will threaten the 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
I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female, they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up
and this is the worst thing we do to girls
they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form. — Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie
Greatness depends on where you are coming from. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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
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
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
Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Blaine needed what she was unable to give and she needed what he was unable to give, and she grieved this, the loss of what could have been. So — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Like how the government of General Abacha was using its foreign policy to legitimize itself in the eyes of other African countries. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The "male gaze," as a shaper of my life's choices, is largely incidental. Gender — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
And what's a Magic Negro, you ask? The black man who is eternally wise and kind. He never reacts under great suffering, never gets angry, is never threatening. He always forgives all kinds of racist shit. He teaches the white person how to break down the sad but understandable prejudice in his heart. You see this man in many films. And Obama is straight from central casting. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you rooted for the following, in this order: women of color, black men, and white women, before, finally, white men - which meant you never rooted for white men. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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
There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought - to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet - and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
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
He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
He had proved himself to the other men by how well he did at training, how he scaled the obstacles and shimmied up the rough rope, but he had made no friend. He said very little. He did not want to know their stories. It was better to leave each man's load unopened, undisturbed, in his own mind. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn't exist, so I didn't leave. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi's eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Gender and class are different. Poor men still have the privileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. Yet he understood. It had to be comforting, this denial of history. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S. — 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
We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie