Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

364. “I meant to say I am sorry Papa broke your figurines, but the words that came out were, ‘I’m sorry your figurines broke, Mama.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

365. “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

366. “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

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. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “Her feet had turned into snails.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

373. “I am just as human as the man.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

374. “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

375. “A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

376. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

378. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

389. “Everybody will have an opinion about what you should do, but what matters is what you want for yourself, and not what others want you to want.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

392. “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

393. “They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

400. “It’s a novel, right? What’s it about?” Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie