Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “And never say that Chudi is “babysitting” – people who babysit are people for whom the baby is not a primary responsibility.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

302. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

304. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

307. “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

308. “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

309. “I thought then of catechism classes, about chanting the answer to a question, an answer that was “because he has said it and his word is true.” I could not remember the question.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

336. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

338. “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

339. “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

340. “Her feet had turned into snails.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

346. “That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. 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

347. “The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

348. “I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I’m supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I’ve met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. Honestly, if anybody wants to raise bi-racial kids, do it in Nigeria.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

349. “I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, “Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?” This type of question is a way of silencing a person’s specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

350. “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. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie