Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Culture does not make people. People make culture.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2. “You deserve to take up space.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

3. “Stories matter. Many stories matter.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

4. “Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

5. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

6. “Never ever accept ‘Because You Are A Woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

7. “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

8. “There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

9. “Your life belongs to you and you alone.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

10. “Privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

11. “I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

12. “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

13. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

14. “The higher you go, the fewer women there are.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

15. “To choose to write is to reject silence.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

16. “We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

17. “I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

22. “Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

23. “We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

24. “The only reason race matters is because of racism.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

27. “Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

28. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

30. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

31. “I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only’. Not ‘as long as’. I matter equally. Full stop.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

32. “The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

33. “I have many problems in my life, but I don’t think that identity is one of them.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

34. “I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

35. “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

36. “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

37. “The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

38. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

40. “There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

42. “Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

43. “Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

45. “She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

46. “I didn’t know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

47. “I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

48. “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

49. “Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

50. “We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie