Chimamanda Best Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly. — 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

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

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

...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs.
Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'.
Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home. — 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

Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there. — 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

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

I sort of consider myself a Nigerian who spends a lot of time in the U.S. — 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

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

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

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

Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? 'Not to Be Married to a Poor Man.' To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best." Richard — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it's a lie but you buy into it and that's all that matters. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I want to hold his hand, but I know he will shake it free. His eyes are too full of guilt to really see me, to see his reflection in my eyes, the reflection of my hero, the brother who tried always to protect me the best he could. He will never think that he did enough, and he will never understand that I do not think he should have done more. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.Remember this is our newly middle-class world. We haven't completed the first cycle of prosperity, before going back to the beginning again, to drink milk from the cow's udder. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

The "male gaze," as a shaper of my life's choices, is largely incidental. Gender — 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

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

Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist. — 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

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

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

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

Greatness depends on where you are coming from. — 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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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