Ifemelu Quotes & Sayings

There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take "charity" for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know - perhaps it came from having had a yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this ... Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given. To be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

Mariama finished her customer's hair, sprayed it with sheen, and, after the customer left, she said, "I'm going to get Chinese." Aisha and Halima told her what they wanted - General Tso's Chicken Very Spicy, Chicken Wings, Orange Chicken - with the quick ease of people saying what they said every day. "You want anything?" Mariama asked Ifemelu. "No, thanks," Ifemelu said. "Your hair take long. You need food," Aisha — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Now." After Ifemelu hung up, still amused, she decided to change the title of her blog to Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Job Vacancy in America - National Arbiter in Chief of "Who Is Racist" In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here's the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven't — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Bartholomew wore khaki trousers pulled up high on his belly, and spoke with an American accent filled with holes, mangling words until they were impossible to understand. Ifemelu sensed, from his demeanor, a deprived rural upbringing that he tried to compensate for with his American affectation, his gonnas and wannas. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu's visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu's visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer's Cane, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. 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. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu was looking forward to being away from home, to the independence of owning her own time. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

A man with dry, graying skin and a mop of white hair came in with a plastic tray of herbal potions for sale. "No, no, no," Aisha said to him, palm raised as though to ward him off. The man retreated. Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales. She should have bought something. "You talk Igbo to Chijioke. He listen to you," Aisha said. "You talk Igbo?" "Of course I speak Igbo," Ifemelu said, defensive, wondering if Aisha was again suggesting that America had changed her. "Take it easy!" she added, because Aisha had pulled a tiny-toothed comb through a section of her hair. "Your hair hard," Aisha said. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

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

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

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

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, "I was waiting for her to ask 'Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?' Why didn't she just ask 'Was it the black girl or the white girl?'"
Ginika laughed. "Because this is America. You're supposed to pretend that you don't notice certain things. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu decided to stop faking an American accent on a sunlit day in July, the same day she met Blaine. It was convincing, the accent. She had perfected, from careful watching of friends and newscasters, the blurring of the t, the creamy roll of the r, the sentences starting with "so," and the sliding response of "oh really," but the accent creaked with consciousness, it was an act of will. It took an effort, the twisting of lip, the curling of tongue. If she were in a panic, or terrified, or jerked awake during a fire, she would not remember how to produce those American sounds. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

Laura picked up the menu again. "In graduate school I knew a woman from Africa who was just like this doctor, I think she was from Uganda. She was wonderful, and she didn't get along with the African-American woman in our class at all. She didn't have all those issues." "Maybe when the African American's father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan's father was running for parliament or studying at Oxford," Ifemelu said. Laura stared at her, made a mocking confused face. "Wait, did I miss something?" "I just think it's a simplistic comparison to make. You need to understand a bit more history," Ifemelu said. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify" in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people's stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. — 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

Later, she said, "I have to take my braids out for my interviews and relax my hair. Kemi told me that I shouldn't wear braids to the interview. If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional." "So there are no doctors with braided hair in America?" Ifemelu asked. "I have told you what they told me. You are in a country that is not your own. You do what you have to do if you want to succeed. — 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

He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with "sort of," and "the ways in which"; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When Sister Ibinabo was talking to Christie, with that poisonous spite she claimed was religious guidance, Ifemelu had looked at her and suddenly seen something of her own mother. Her mother was a kinder and simpler person, but like Sister Ibinabo, she was a person who denied that things were as they were. A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires. Suddenly, the last thing Ifemelu wanted was to be in that small room full of shadows. It had all seemed benign before, her mother's faith, all drenched in grace, and suddenly it no longer was. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

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

They have the kinds of things we can eat.' An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she were not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the other things she had become used to in America, even quinoa, Blaine's specialty, made with feta and tomatoes. This was what she hoped she had not become but feared that she had: a "they have the kinds of things we can eat" kind of person. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

Don't you just hate it how people say 'I'm pressed' or 'I want to ease myself' when they want to go to the bathroom?" Doris asked. Ifemelu laughed. "I know!" "I guess 'bathroom' is very American. But there's 'toilet,' 'restroom,' 'the ladies.' " "I never liked 'the ladies.' I like 'toilet.' " "Me too!" Doris said. "And don't you just hate it when people here use 'on' as a verb? On the light!" "You know what I can't stand? When people say 'take' instead of 'drink.' I will take wine. I don't take beer." "Oh God, I know! — 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