Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not “if only.” Not “as long as.” I matter equally. Full stop.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

352. “There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

353. “Teach her about privilege and inequality and the importance of giving dignity to everyone who does not mean her harm – teach her that the household help is human just like her, teach her always to greet the driver. Link these expectations to her identity – for example, say to her “In our family, when you are a child, you greet those older than you no matter what job they do.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

354. “He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me – he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke – was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

355. “It was not as if he did not know what living in Lagos could do to a woman married to a young and wealthy man, how easy it was to slip into paranoid about ‘Lagos girls,’ those sophisticated monsters of glamour who swallowed husbands whole, slithering them down their throats.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

356. “She flinched from him, the hoarseness of his voice, the nebulous and easy meaninglessness of his words. What did “responsibility about what I need to do” mean? Did it mean that he wanted to continue seeing her but had to stay married? Did it mean that he could no longer continue seeing her? He communicated clearly when he wanted to, but now here he was, hiding behind watery words.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

357. “But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

358. “But she was uncomfortable with what the professors called ‘participation,’ and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

359. “Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

360. “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

361. “And even though she checked “yes” to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

362. “One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

363. “Between her and what she should feel, there was a gap. She cared about nothing. She wanted to care, but she no longer knew how; it had slipped from her memory, the ability to care.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

364. “I am just as human as the man.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

365. “Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl. ‘Because you are a girl’ is never a reason for anything. Ever.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

366. “How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

367. “Isn’t it odd that in most societies in the world today, women generally cannot propose marriage? Marriage is such a major step in your life, and yet you cannot take charge of it; it depends on a man asking you.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

368. “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

369. “Olanna felt the slow sadness of missing a person who was still there.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

370. “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

371. “They believed. They truly believed. It often came to her as a sweet shock, the knowledge that there were so many people in the world who felt exactly as she and Blaine did about Barack Obama. On.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

372. “He blamed her for making him a person who was not entirely in control of what he was feeling.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

373. “She was a literal person who did not read, she was content rather than curious about the world.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

374. “It was black-black, so thick it drank two containers of relaxer at the salon, so full it took hours under the hooded dryer, and, when finally released from pink plastic rollers, sprang free and full, flowing down her back like a celebration. Her father called it a crown of glory.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

375. “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. 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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

376. “Their marriage just blocked the blessings in our life, and the worst part is that they didn’t even fight.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

377. “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. And Feminism Lite enables this.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

378. “Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling,” Nneoma said.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

379. “For me, feminism is always contextual.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

380. “Of course, of course, but my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe,’ Master said. ‘I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

381. “And, in the pride in her eyes, he saw a shinier, better version of himself.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

382. “Those plates, with their amateur finishing, the slight lumpiness of the edges, would never be shown in the presence of guests in Nigeria. He still was not sure whether Emenike had become a person who believed that something was beautiful because it was handmade by poor people in a foreign country, or whether he had simply learned to pretend so.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

383. “She had a formidable air; a person who went about setting everyone and everything right in the world.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

384. “When your uncle first married me, I worried because I thought those women outside would come and displace me from my home. I now know that nothing he does will make my life change. My life will only change if I want it to change.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

385. “My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

386. “You look like a black American” was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

387. “She heard his words like a melody and she felt herself breathing unevenly, gulping at the air. She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

388. “You can’t even read American fiction to get a sense of how actual life is lived these days. You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

389. “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

390. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

391. “You don’t even have to love your job; you can merely love what your job does for you – the confidence and self-fulfillment that come with doing and earning.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

392. “She was too afraid to hope, now that it seemed possible.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

393. “Why do you need so much outside of yourself? Why isn’t what you are enough?”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

394. “There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman’s well-being.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

395. “Her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

396. “Of course I am angry. I am angry about racism. I am angry about sexism. But I recently came to the realization that I am angrier about sexism than I am about racism. Because in my anger about sexism, I often feel lonely. Because I love, and live among, many people who easily acknowledge race injustice but not gender injustice.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

397. “She was after all the kind of woman who would make a man easily uproot his life, the kind who, because she did not expect or ask for certainty, made a certain kind of sureness become possible.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

398. “Look, all of them are white women. This one is supposed to be Hispanic, we know this because they wrote two Spanish words here, but she looks exactly like this white woman, no difference in her skin tone and hair and features. Now, I’m going to flip through, page by page, and you tell me how many black women you see.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

399. “Of course they nurse resentment, as they well should, but it has somehow managed to leave their spirits whole.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

400. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie