Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

153. “There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

154. “I want to hold his hand, but I know he will shake it free. His eyes are too full of guilt to really see me, to see his reflection in my eyes, the reflection of my hero, the brother who tried always to protect me the best he could. He will never think that he did enough, and he will never understand that I do not think he should have done more.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

156. “Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite. It is the idea of conditional female equality. Please reject this entirely. It is a hollow, appeasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not. Feminism.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

157. “What a beautiful name,” Kimberly said. “Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought “culture” the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with “rich.” She would not think Norway had a “rich culture.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

158. “When Philip complained about the French couple building a house next to his in Cornwall, Emenike asked, ‘Are they between you and the sunset?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

160. “There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

161. “To call him humble was to make rudeness normal. Besides, humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others; you were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued; he had always wished himself to be truly honest, and always feared that he was not.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

162. “To restore the dignity of man. Obiora was reading the plaque, too. He let out a short cackle and asked, “But when did man lose his dignity?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

163. “A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

164. “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. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak, a hard man.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

165. “Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

166. “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

167. “Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that... Marlene Sanders... once gave this piece of advice to a younger journalist: “Never apologize for working. You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to give to your child.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

168. “We teach females, that in relationships, ‘compromise’ is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs, or for accomplishments – which I think can be a good thing – but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

169. “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. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don’t mind knowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters’ boyfriends? God forbid.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

170. “She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

171. “Ogbenyealu is a common name for girls and you know what it means? ‘Not to Be Married to a Poor Man.’ To stamp that on a child at birth is capitalism at its best.” Richard.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

172. “Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

174. “A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl. Permission and being allowed, when used one-sidedly – and they are nearly only used that way – should never be the language of an equal marriage.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

175. “The waiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women. And I know the waiters don’t intend any harm, but it is one thing to know intellectually, and quite another to feel it emotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, that I am just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are little things but sometimes it’s the little things that sting the most.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

176. “If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitor, then at some point we will all think, even if unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

177. “Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man? What if we decide to simply dispose of that word – and I don’t know if there is an English word I dislike more than this – emasculation.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

178. “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

179. “Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

180. “In secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meager pocket money. Yet the boy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

181. “Take cooking, for example. 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?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

182. “Ojiugo wore orange lipstick and ripped jeans, spoke bluntly, and smoked in public, provoking vicious gossip and dislike from other girls, not because she did these things but because she dared to without having lived abroad, or having a foreign parent, those qualities that would have made them forgive her lack of conformity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

183. “I am an agnostic respecter of religion.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

184. “He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or whether he liked it because he was supposed to.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

185. “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. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size. She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not, how she worried that she should know what she wanted to do with her life but did not.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

186. “When I lost my whole family, every single one, it was as if I had been born all over again,” Inatimi told Richard in his quiet way. “I was a new person because I no longer had family to remind me of what I had been.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

187. “Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

188. “Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

189. “How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

190. “Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

191. “It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

192. “If she likes makeup, let her wear it. If she likes fashion, let her dress up. But if she doesn’t like either, let her be. Don’t think that raising her feminist means forcing her to reject femininity. Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

193. “He had discovered that grief did not dim with time; it was instead a volatile state of being.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

194. “It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

195. “It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because 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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

196. “People will selectively use “tradition” to justify anything.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

198. “We police girls. We praise girls for virginity but we don’t praise boys for virginity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

199. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

200. “Grace would ponder this story for a long time, with great sadness, and it would cause her to make a clear link between education and dignity, between the hard, obvious things that are printed in books and the soft, subtle things that lodge themselves into the soul.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie