Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Wise Famous Quotes.

You make me shy," he said.
"Are you serious? Because you make me shy."
"I don't believe anything makes you shy," he said.

And begin a life in which she alone determined the margins.

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

How did they know when to laugh? What to laugh about?

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

course it was angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry.

Don't see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?

Never ever accept 'Because You Are A Woman' as a reason for doing or not doing anything.

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

To choose to write is to reject silence.

Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.

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

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

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

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.

There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.

Nature's first green is gold.

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

Because you are a girl" is never a reason for anything. Ever.

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.

This man who ate her apple cores and turned even that into something of a moral act.

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.

Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.

Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk.

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

Did not talk to people, they instead talked at people,

He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them

On the Subject of Non-American Blacks Suffering from Illnesses Whose Names They Refuse to Know.

I cannot control even the dreams that I have made.

You deserve to take up space.

The truth has become an insult.

She did not understand grunge, the idea of looking shabby because you could afford not to be shabby; it mocked true shabbiness.

It's strange how I have felt, with every major event that has occurred in my life, that you were the only person who would understand.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.

smiling a smile full of things restrained

Boys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences.

When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told - are really dependent on power.

He thought the police would have to do better; everyone knew the cult boys had more modern guns

To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.

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

Her insecurity, so great and so ordinary, silenced him.

White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn't threatening

This was love, to be eager for tomorrow.

The problem with stereotypes is not because they are untrue, its because they are incomplete; they make one story, the only story

The most unforgettable dinner parties happened when guests said unexpected, and potentially offensive, things. The

After work, she wandered around the center of Baltimore, aimlessly, interested in nothing. Was this what the novelists meant by ennui?

Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.

Why should a woman's success be a threat to a man?

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.

One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.

If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise

There was something immodest about her modesty: it announced itself.

The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.

she thought that the romance novelists were wrong and it was men, not women, who were the true romantics.

With him, she felt breakable, precious.

loping, comfortable gait pulled my eyes and held them. I turned and dashed into the flat. I could see the front yard

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.

What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people.

Tell Chizalum that women actually don't need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings.

I was stained by failure.

Before, she would have said, "I know," that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge

He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.

Yet such men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime as a brother or son in order to feel empathy.

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

We use the word "respect" to mean something a women shows a man, but not often something a man shows a woman.

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

He said "see" as if it meant something more than what one did with one's eyes.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.

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.

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

Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not "if only." Not "as long as." I matter equally. Full stop.

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.

His mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be. He

They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her.

For me, feminism is always contextual.

That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone.

A person who had to spread the cloak of religion over her own petty desires.

Talk to her about sex, and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward, but it is necessary.

You were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.

I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance.

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.

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.

Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends

She was not curvy or big-boned; she was fat, it was the only word that felt true. And she had ignored, too, the cement in her soul.

America's tribalisms - race, ideology, and region - became clear.

He was not living his life; life was living him

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

New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage.

And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.

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.

I am just as human as the man.

He felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.