Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

102. “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. 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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

103. “The best novels are those that are important without being like medicine; they have something to say, are expansive and intelligent but never forget to be entertaining and to have character and emotion at their centre.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

105. “There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

106. “Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

107. “Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

109. “Gender and class are different. Poor men still have the privileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

110. “But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

111. “I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

112. “Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

113. “Stories matter.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

114. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

115. “For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

116. “At some point I was a HappyAfricanFeminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

117. “You lower your voice when you speak. You talk in whispers.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

118. “I wince now at the words I said in the past to grieving friends. “Find peace in your memories,” I used to say. To have love snatched from you, especially unexpectedly, and then to be told to turn to memories. Rather than succor, my memories bring eloquent stabs of pain that say, “This is what you will never again have.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

119. “Education is a priority! How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

120. “Never speak of marriage as an achievement. Find ways to make clear to her that marriage is not an achievement, nor is it what she should aspire to. A marriage can be happy or unhappy, but it is not an achievement.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

121. “The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership. We.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

122. “A good education isn’t the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained!”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

123. “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. 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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

124. “Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

125. “Look at you. You’re the kindest person I know. Look how beautiful you are. Why do you need so much outside of yourself? Why isn’t what you are enough?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

126. “She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

127. “These are little things but sometimes it’s the little things that sting the most.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

128. “If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

129. “There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

130. “Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

131. “Philadelphia had the musty scent of history. New Haven smelled of neglect. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. But Princeton had no smell.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

132. “The white missionaries brought us their god,” Amaka was saying. “Which was the same color as them, worshiped in their language and packaged in the boxes they made. Now that we take their god back to them, shouldn’t we at least repackage it?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

133. “It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn’t.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

134. “A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

135. “Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

136. “But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shade of your skin and the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair. Booker.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

137. “My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better. All of us, women and men, must do better.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

138. “I don’t think love as a reason. I think love comes first and then the reasons follow.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

139. “There is so much that is still silent between Jaja and me. Perhaps we will talk more with time, or perhaps we never will be able to say it all, to clothe things in words, things that have long been naked.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

140. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

141. “We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

142. “Some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

143. “We raise girls to see each other as competitors – not for jobs or accomplishments, which in my opinion can be a good thing – but for the attention of men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

144. “Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

145. “She wanted Azuka to learn the ways of these foreigners, since people ruled over others not because they were better people but because they had better guns;.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

146. “What if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was not “the boy has to pay,” but rather, “whoever has more should pay.” Of course, because of their historical advantage, it is mostly men who will have more today. But if we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means. But.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

147. “You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same – condescending.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

148. “I cannot control even the dreams that I have made.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

149. “She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi’s eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

150. “They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It’s so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie