Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

452. “The afternoon played across my mind as I got out of the car in front of the flat. I had smiled, run, laughed. My chest was filled with something like bath foam. Light. The lightness was so sweet I tasted it on my tongue, the sweetness of an overripe bright yellow cashew fruit.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

453. “I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

454. “Another revelation: how much laughter is a part of grief. Laughter is tightly braided into our family argot, and now we laugh remembering my father, but somewhere in the background there is a haze of disbelief. The laughter trails off. The laughter becomes tears and becomes sadness and becomes rage. I am unprepared for my wretched, roaring rage. In the face of this inferno that is sorrow, I am callow and unformed.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

455. “Adulthood, after all, already loomed, where she would have to make grimmer and grimmer decisions.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

456. “Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

457. “Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

458. “She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

459. “If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

460. “It is instinctive my recoiling. I imagine the confusion of some relatives, their disapproval even, when faced with my withdrawal; the calls I leave unanswered, the messages unread...”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

461. “Do you try to treat cancer sores or the cancer itself? We cannot afford to give pocket money to our children. We cannot afford to eat meat. We cannot afford bread. So your child steals and you turn to him in surprise? You must try to heal the cancer because the sores will keep coming back.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

462. “Fear. I was familiar with fear, yet each time I felt it, it was never the same as the other times, as though it came in different flavors and colors.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

463. “He was eighty-eight” so deeply riles because age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

464. “He had first been excited by Facebook, ghosts of old friends suddenly morphing to life with wives and husbands and children, and photos trailed by comments. But he began to be appalled by the air of unreality, the careful manipulation of images to create a parallel life, pictures that people had taken with Facebook in mind, placing in the background the things of which they were proud.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

465. “A friend sends me a line from my novel: ‘Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.’ How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

466. “How much did one know of the true feelings of those who did not have a voice?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

467. “The value we give to “Mrs.” means that marriage changes the social status of a woman bur not that of a man.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

468. “There is such a thing as the worst day of a life, and please, dear universe, I do not want anything ever to top it.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

469. “Poder es la capacidad no solo de contar la historia de otra persona, sino de convertirla en la historia definitiva de dicha persona.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

470. “Everybody will have an opinion about what you should do, but what matters is what you want for yourself, and not what others want you to want. Please reject the idea that motherhood and work are mutually exclusive.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

471. “Now the verandah was so silent I could hear the sound of the raindrops sliding off the leaves.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

472. “Tears were so cheap now.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

473. “There are people who say, ‘Well, your name is also about patriarchy because it is your father’s name.’ Indeed. But the point is simply this: whether it came from my father or from the moon, it is the name that I have had since I was born, the name with which I travelled my life’s milestones, the name I have answered to since the first day I went to kindergarten in Nsukka on a hazy morning and my teacher said, ‘Answer “present” if you hear your name. Number one: Adichie!’.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

474. “I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

475. “I am afraid of tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after...”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

476. “It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

477. “How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

478. “All of us – women and men – must do better.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

479. “Beautiful people are not usually loners.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

480. “Does love bring, even if unconsciously, the delusional arrogance of expecting never to be touched by grief?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

481. “I remembered my father coaching me before I took my GCE exam and how he said, as I stalled in solving a long equation, ‘Yes, you’re getting there. Don’t doubt yourself. Don’t stop.’ Is that why I believe now in always trying? It is, of course, too easy to draw simple causative lines. It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

482. “It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

483. “My breathing is difficult. Is this what shock means, that the air turns to glue?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

484. “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?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

485. “Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

486. “Never’ has come to say. ‘Never’ feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

487. “The moon was always a brilliant white, and once in a while the night wind brought the hooting of owls and the rise and fall of voices from the refugee camp. Baby slept on a mat with Olanna’s wrapper over her to keep the mosquitoes away.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

488. “I back away from condolences. People are kind, people mean well, but knowing this does not make their words rankle less.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

489. “I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

490. “Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

491. “Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque. The weight is heaviest in the mornings, post-sleep: a leaden heart, a stubborn reality that refuses to budge. I will never see my father again. Never again. It feels as if I wake up only to sink and sink. In those moments, I am sure that I do not ever want to face the world again.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

492. “I wish... I wish... the guilt gnaws at my soul. I think of all the things that could’ve happened, and all the ways the world could’ve been reshaped to prevent what happened on that day...”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

493. “They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

494. “Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled, Americans have sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of red states and blue states. We have been and always will be the United States of America.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

495. “His humor, already dry, crisped deliciously as he aged.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

496. “And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

497. “Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

498. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

499. “And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

500. “I liked to call him ‘a gentle man and a gentleman’.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie