Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Teach her that the idea of “gender roles” is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl. “Because you are a girl” is never a reason for anything. Ever.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

54. “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

55. “The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

56. “Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in real African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

57. “In teaching her about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints. Saintliness is not a prerequisite for dignity. People who are unkind and dishonest are still human, and still deserve dignity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

58. “They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

59. “He was not living his life; life was living him.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

60. “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

61. “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. For X please insert words like “anger,” “ambition,” “loudness,” “stubbornness,” “coldness,” “ruthlessness.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

62. “I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn’t that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

63. “Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

65. “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

66. “If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

67. “What if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead of gender?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

68. “Because you are a girl” is never a reason for anything. Ever.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

70. “Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

71. “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

72. “I was stained by failure.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

73. “Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

74. “Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love, and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don’t teach boys to do the same?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

75. “If we ran Nigeria like this cell,” he said, “we would have no problems in this country. Things are so organized. Our cell has a Chief called General Abacha and he has a second in command. Once you come in, you have to give them some money. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

76. “Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

77. “Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

78. “Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

79. “Greatness depends on where you are coming from.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

80. “I don’t believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

81. “Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men – cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was going to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of famous cooks in the world – who are given the fancy title of “chef” – are men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

82. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

83. “To be a child of the Third World is to be aware of the many different constituencies you have and how honesty and truth must always depend on context.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

84. “We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

85. “Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

86. “She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

87. “People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

88. “If you followed the media you’d think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that’s not the case; so it’s important to engage with the other Africa.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

89. “We never actively remember death,′ Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

90. “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

91. “Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

92. “Gender roles are so deeply conditioned in us that we will often follow them even when they chafe against our true desires, our needs, our happiness.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

93. “All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

94. “You Americans, always peering under people’s beds to look for communism.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

95. “This was love, to be eager for tomorrow.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

96. “If she sees you reading, she will understand that reading is valuable.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

97. “Many girls spend too much time trying to be “nice” to people who do them harm. Many girls think of the “feelings” of those who are hurting them. This is the catastrophic consequence of likeability. 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

98. “The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence. They had not read her blog but they had heard that she was a “leading blogger” about race.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

99. “I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

100. “For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie