Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

303. “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

304. “They expected certain things of her, and forgave certain things from her, because she was foreign. Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said “blowhard.” She was struck by the word, by the irredeemable Americanness of it. Blowhard. It was a word that would never occur to her. To understand this was to realize that Curt and his friends would, on some level, never be fully knowable to her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

305. “And never say that Chudi is “babysitting” – people who babysit are people for whom the baby is not a primary responsibility.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

306. “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

307. “Tell Chizalum that women actually don’t need to be championed and revered; they just need to be treated as equal human beings.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

308. “Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

309. “Obinze imagined him, dutiful and determined, visiting the places he was supposed to visit, thinking, as he did so, not of the things he was seeing but of the photos he would take of them and of the people who would see those photos.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

310. “Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

311. “She is one of those black people who want to be the only black person in the room, so any other black person is an immediate threat to her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

312. “In America, you don’t get to decide what race you are. It is decided for you.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

313. “He was tired, it was not a physical fatigue, but a draining lassitude that numbed the margins of his mind.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

314. “I think love is the most important thing in life. Whatever kind, however you define it, but I think of it generally as being greatly valued by another human being and greatly valuing another human being.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

315. “He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more than the average salary plus stock options because they were desperately trying to look diverse.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

316. “She was used to this, being grabbed by men who walked around in a cloud of cologne-drenched entitlement, with the presumption that, because they were powerful and found her beautiful, they belonged together.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

317. “I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all my femaleness. Because I deserve to be. I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas. I am girly. I am happily girly. I like high heels and trying on lipsticks.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

318. “Richard wanted to ask why God had allowed the war to happen in the first place. Yet their faith moved him. If God could make them care so genuinely, God was a worthy concept.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

319. “It is easy to say, ‘But women can just say no to all this.’ But the reality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

320. “She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

321. “Perhaps he was not a true writer after all. He had read somewhere that, for true writers, nothing was more important than their art, not even love.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

322. “Tell her that her body belongs to her and her alone, that she should never feel the need to say yes to something she does not want, or something she feels pressured to do. Teach her that saying no when no feels right is something to be proud of.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

323. “Some people ask, ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

324. “But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

325. “They tell us race is an invention, that there is no genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroid. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, is race an invention or not?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

326. “Still, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don’t teach boys to do the same? I.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

327. “Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression “human rights” is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

328. “Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

329. “Before, she would have said, “I know,” that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

330. “It seemed to me that in America blacks and whites work together but don’t play together, and here blacks and whites play together but don’t work together,” Emenike said.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

331. “You know, you’re a feminist.” It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone – the same tone with which a person would say, “You’re a supporter of terrorism.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

332. “Sometimes, mothers, so conditioned to be all and do all, are complicit in diminishing the role of fathers.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

333. “Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol – in small amounts.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

334. “He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgement of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ he said often.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

335. “There was a feeling I wanted to feel that I did not feel.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

336. “It’s strange how I have felt, with every major event that has occurred in my life, that you were the only person who would understand.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

337. “If the justification for controlling women’s bodies were about women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the reason was ‘women should not wear short skirts because they can get cancer if they do.’ Instead the reason is not about women, but about men. Women must be ‘covered up’ to protect men. I find this deeply dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the appetites of men.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

338. “The best thing about America is that it gives you space. I like that. I like that you buy into the dream, it’s a lie but you buy into it and that’s all that matters.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

339. “Darkness descended upon him, and when it lifted he knew that he would never see Kainene again and that his life would always be a candlelit room; he would see things only in shadow, only in half glimpses.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

340. “But Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

341. “We also need to question the idea of marriage as a prize to women, because that is the basis of these absurd debates. If we stopped conditioning women to see marriage as a prize, then we would have fewer debates about a wife needing to cook in order to earn that prize.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

342. “I know that they don’t intend harm, but it is one thing to know something intellectually and quite another to feel it.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

343. “Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

344. “Oh, it’s normal,” he said, and she remembered how he had always been quick to reassure her, to make her feel better. “I was away for a much shorter time, obviously, but I was very surprised when I came back. I kept thinking that things should have waited for me but they hadn’t.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

345. “She sits at the edge of the leather sofa and looks around the living room, remembers the delivery man from Ethan Interiors who changed the lampshade the other day. “You got a great house, ma’am,” he’d said, with that curious American smile that meant he believed he, too, could have something like it someday. It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

346. “Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

347. “Her feet had turned into snails.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

348. “So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

349. “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 was ugly.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

350. “Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that kindness must never be taken for granted. Tell her that she, too, deserves the kindness of others. 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 er that if anything ever makes her uncomfortable, to speak up, to say it, to shout.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie