Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “A man is likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative and creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

202. “If we don’t place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

203. “A Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me. I was not worried at all – it had not even occurred to me to be worried, because a man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

204. “If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

205. “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

206. “We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

207. “We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

208. “Never apologize for working. You love what you do, and loving what you do is a great gift to give your child.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

209. “The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone; she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

210. “You will also find that you might make friends more easily with other internationals, Koreans, Indians, Brazilians, whatever, than with Americans both black and white. Many of the internationals understand the trauma of trying to get an American visa and that is a good place to start a friendship.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

211. “La cultura no hace a la gente. La gente hace la cultura. Si es verdad que no forma parte de nuestra cultura el hecho de que las mujeres sean seres humanos de pleno derecho, entonces podemos y debemos cambiar nuestra cultura.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

212. “She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots – “religious with undertones of ethnic tension” the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

213. “There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take “charity” for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know – perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

214. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

215. “But why do we say nothing?” Ujunwa asked. She raised her voice and looked at the others. “Why do we always say nothing?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

216. “That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

217. “Try not to use words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” too often with Chizalum. We feminists can sometimes be too jargony, and jargon can sometimes feel too abstract. Don’t just label something misogynistic; tell her why it is, and tell her what would make it not be.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

218. “Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

219. “How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

220. “She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman’s crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

221. “There were emotions she wanted to hold in the palm of her hand that were simply no longer there.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

222. “But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

223. “They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze felt repulsion and longing; he pitied them, but he also imagined being like them.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

224. “Some people will say a woman is subordinate to men because its our culture. But culture is constantly changing... culture does not make people, people makes culture.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

225. “There was something unquestioning about her roommates’ lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, “Let’s go get some,” about whatever it was they needed – more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor – as though this getting was not an act that required money.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

226. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

227. “He said, ‘Ifemelu is a fine babe but she is too much trouble. She can argue. She can talk. She never agrees. But Ginika is just a sweet girl.’ ” He paused, then added, “He didn’t know that was exactly what I hoped to hear. I’m not interested in girls that are too nice.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

228. “One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

230. “The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

231. “Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

232. “A father is as much a verb as a mother.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

233. “Just in case this is the last time we hold hands, let’s really hold hands. Because a motorcycle or a car can kill us now, or I might see the real man of my dreams down the street and leave you or you might see the real woman of your dreams and leave me.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

234. “Teach her never to universalize her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realization that difference is normal. Tell.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

235. “Ifemelu stood by the window while Aunty Uju sat at the table drinking orange juice and airing her grievances like jewels. It had become a routine of Ifemelu’s visits: Aunty Uju collected all her dissatisfactions in a silk purse, nursing them, polishing them, and then on the Saturday of Ifemelu’s visit, while Bartholomew was out and Dike upstairs, she would spill them out on the table, and turn each one this way and that, to catch the light.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

236. “She liked that he wore their relationship so boldly, like a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. She would sink into moodiness, and snap at Obinze, or be distant. And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

237. “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

238. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

239. “It seemed so natural, to talk to him about the odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

240. “Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

241. “We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

242. “The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

243. “Everybody is hungry in this country, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

244. “So you say. A woman with children and no husband, what is that?” “Me.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

245. “Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

246. “She had always got along with Ifemelu’s mother, the easy relationship between two people who carefully avoided conversations of any depth.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

247. “But by far the worst thing we do to males – by making them feel they have to be hard – is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

248. “When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told her Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

249. “Grandpapa used to say, about difficulties he had gone through, ‘It did not kill me, it made me knowledgeable.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

250. “Like how the government of General Abacha was using its foreign policy to legitimize itself in the eyes of other African countries.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie