Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “There was a stripped-down quality to her life, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends and home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

252. “The sad truth of the matter is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as the norm. Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn’t wonder about being taken seriously based on what he is wearing – but a woman does.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

253. “We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up – and this is the worst thing we do to girls – they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

254. “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

255. “So teach Chizalum that biology is an interesting and fascinating subject, but she should never accept it as justification for any social norm. Because social norms are created by human beings, and there is no social norm that cannot be changed.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

257. “He reminded her of Obinze’s expression for people he liked. Obi ocha. A clean heart.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

258. “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

259. “There are slightly more women than men in the world – 52 percent of the world’s population is female – but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

260. “Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

261. “Let’s have a child,” he said again. “A little girl just like you, and we will call her Obianuju because she will complete us.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

262. “Each memory stunned her with its blinding luminosity. Each brought with it a sense of unassailable loss, a great burden hurtling towards her, and she wished she could duck, lower herself so that it would bypass her, so that she would save herself. Love was a kind of grief. This was what the novelists meant by suffering. She had often thought it a little silly, the idea of suffering for love, but now she understood.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

263. “Not long ago, I wrote an article about being young and female in Lagos. And an acquaintance told me that it was an angry article, and I should not have made it so angry. But I was unapologetic. Of course it was angry. 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. In addition to anger, I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

264. “So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men. Of.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

265. “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. If we keep seeing only men as heads of corporations, it starts to seem “natural” that only men should be heads of corporations.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

266. “You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you rooted for the following, in this order: women of color, black men, and white women, before, finally, white men – which meant you never rooted for white men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

267. “Teach her that to love is not only to give but also to take. This is important because we give girls subtle cues about their lives – we teach girls that a large component of their ability to love is their ability to sacrifice their selves.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

268. “Men’s grooming is never suspect in the way women’s grooming is – a well-dressed man does not worry that, because he is dressed well, certain assumptions might be made about his intelligence, his ability, or his seriousness. A woman, on the other hand, is always aware of how a bright lipstick or a carefully-put-together outfit might very well make others assume her to be frivolous.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

269. “Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive. It is misogynistic to suggest that they are.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

270. “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. 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

271. “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. 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

272. “In a healthy relationship, it is the role of whoever can provide to provide.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

273. “We are very ideological about fiction in this country. If a character is not familiar, then that character becomes unbelievable.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

274. “Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are the little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

275. “At first Ifemelu thought Kimberly’s apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

276. “Show her that she does not need to be liked by everyone. Tell her that if someone does not like her, there will be someone else who will. Teach her that she not merely an object to be liked or disliked, she is also a subject who can like and dislike.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

277. “Silence hangs over us, but it is a different kind of silence, one that lets me breathe. I have nightmares about the other kind, the silence of when Papa was alive.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

278. “A young Nigerian woman once told me that she had for years behaved ‘like a boy’ – she liked football and was bored by dresses – until her mother forced her to stop her ‘boyish’ interests. Now she is grateful to her mother for helping her start behaving like a girl. The story made me sad. I wondered what parts of herself she had needed to silence and stifle, and I wondered about what her spirit had lost, because what she called ‘behaving like a boy’ was simply behaving like herself.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

279. “Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

280. “Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

281. “There are slightly more women than men in the world – 52 percent of the world’s population is female – but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men. The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

282. “Love was a kind of grief.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

283. “It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

284. “People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought – to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet – and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

285. “You were praised for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

286. “You looked like the kind of person who will do something because you want to, and not because everyone else is doing it.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

287. “The writer had accused me of being ‘angry’, as though ‘being angry’ were something to be ashamed of. Of course I am angry. I am angry about racism. I am angry about sexism.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

288. “It does not have to mean a literal fifty-fifty or a day-by-day score-keeping, but you’ll know when the child-care work is equally shared. You’ll know by your lack of resentment. Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist. And.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

289. “And I said, Ah correct, there is hope. She reads.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

290. “And I was worried that if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss and my girly skirt, but I decided not to. I wore a very serious, very manly, and very ugly suit.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

291. “Life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

292. “Let her know that there are many individuals and many cultures that do not find the narrow mainstream definition of beauty attractive.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

293. “Teach her to stand up for what is hers. If another child takes her toy without her permission, ask her to take it back, because her consent is important. Tell her that if anything ever makes her uncomfortable, to speak up, to say it, to shout.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

294. “And it struck Obinze that, a few years ago, they were attending weddings, now it was christenings and soon it would be funerals. They would die. They would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

295. “She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

296. “There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

297. “There’s something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You’ve never even accepted that the man is ugly,′ Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

298. “Allow” is a troubling word. “Allow” is about power. You will often hear members of the Nigerian chapter of the Society of Feminism Lite say, “Leave the woman alone to do what she wants as long as her husband allows.” A husband is not a headmaster. A wife is not a schoolgirl. Permission and being allowed, when used one-sidedly – and it is nearly only used that way – should never be the language of an equal marriage.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

299. “You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

300. “One of the things I’ve learned is that everybody in this country has the mentality of scarcity. We imagine that even the things that are not scarce are scarce. And it breeds a kind of desperation in everybody. Even the wealthy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie