Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “I am just as human as the man.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

376. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

389. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “We should not be asking whether a woman can “do it all” but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

395. “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

396. “She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

397. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

400. “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