Chimamanda Adichie Love Quotes & Sayings

Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness? — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Darkness descended on him, and when it lifted, he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his world would always be like a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

He picked up the water bottle, drank deeply from it. I watched the ripples in his throat as the water went down. I wished I were the water, going into him, to be with him, one with him. I never envied water so much before. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don't teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I don't want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life, Curt said with a force that startled her. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He thought about the next time he would laugh with her and then the next. He found himself often thinking about the future, even before the present was over. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

...real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Why do I love him? ... I don't think love has a reason ... I think love comes first and then the reasons follow. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Philadelphia was the smell of the summer sun, of burnt asphalt, of sizzling meat from food carts tucked into street corners, foreign brown men and women hunched inside. Ifemelu would come to like the gyros from those carts, flatbread and lamb and dripping sauces, as she would come to love Philadelphia itself. It did not raise the spectre of intimidation as Manhattan did; it was intimate but not provincial, a city that might yet be kind to you. Ifemelu — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Love is the most important. The most necessary human emotion. Not just romantic love. Love. The ability of human beings to connect. — 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

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

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

They wore their love like a heavy perfume, exuding a transparent commitment, touching each other, referring to each other, — 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

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

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

This was love, to be eager for tomorrow. — 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

If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in. — 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

My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush. — 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

There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

What a beautiful name," Kimberly said. "Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures." Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought "culture" the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with "rich." She would not think Norway had a "rich culture. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Still, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don't teach boys to do the same? I — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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 didn't want to be apologetic about my love story, and I think to be willing to write about love you have to be willing to sound foolish. I wanted to write about foolish and goofy love and different relationships. I wanted to write about interracial relationships in a way that does not pretend as if race does not exist. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie