Top 500 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

404. “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

405. “She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not...”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

406. “She felt bitter toward them at first, because when she tried to talk about the things she had left behind in Nsukka – her books, her piano, her clothes, her china, her wigs, her Singer sewing machine, the television – they ignored her and started to talk about something else. Now she understood that nobody talked about the things left behind.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

407. “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

408. “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

409. “And when, all those years ago, I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

410. “Do it together. Remember in primary school we learned that a verb is a ‘doing’ word? Well, a father is as much a verb as a mother.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

411. “Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were useless. So when she was in the kitchen with him, she talked about the need to keep only things that were useful, and she hoped he would not ask her how the fresh flowers, then, were useful.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

412. “Don’t think that raising her feminist means forcing her to reject femininity. Feminism and femininity are not exclusive.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

413. “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

414. “And remember that it’s not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is. If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

415. “Once she had told him, “The thing about cross-cultural relationships is that you spend so much time explaining. My ex-boyfriends and I spent a lot of time explaining. I sometimes wondered whether we would even have anything at all to say to each other if we were from the same place,” and it pleased him to hear that, because it gave his relationship with her a depth, a lack of trifling novelty. They were from the same place and they still had a lot to say to each other.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

416. “He said “see” as if it meant something more than what one did with one’s eyes.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

417. “The more civilians you bomb, the more resistance you grow.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

418. “You must nod back when a black person nods at you in a heavily white area. It is called the black nod. It is a way for black people to say “You are not alone, I am here too.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

419. “She began to like him because he liked her.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

420. “When Buchi said “Amen!” with that delight, that gusto, Obinze feared she would grow up to be a woman who, with that word “amen,” would squash the questions she wanted to ask of the world.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

421. “They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

422. “White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

423. “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

424. “Her entire body was invaded by millions of uncertainties.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

425. “She did not understand grunge, the idea of looking shabby because you could afford not to be shabby; it mocked true shabbiness.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

426. “America’s tribalisms – race, ideology, and region – became clear.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

427. “What struck me – with her and with many other female American friends I have – is how invested they are in being ‘liked’. How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very important and that this ‘likeable’ trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly. We.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

428. “He realized that what he wanted most of all, with her, was time.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

429. “He often paused before he spoke. She thought this exquisite; it was as though he had such regard for his listener that he wanted his words strung together in the best possible way.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

430. “Do not measure her on a scale of what a girl should be. Measure her on a scale of being the best version of herself.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

431. “Saintliness is not a prerequisite for dignity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

432. “I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

433. “For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

434. “Yet such men do not need to imagine a male victim of crime as a brother or son in order to feel empathy.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

435. “Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

436. “Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

437. “They said “soon” to each other often, and “soon” gave their plan the weight of something real.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

438. “He was always thinking of what else to do and she told him that it was rare for her, because she had grown up not doing, but being.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

439. “We watch films in class,” she told Obinze. “They talk about films here as if films are as important as books. So we watch films and then we write a response paper and almost everybody gets an A. Can you imagine? These Americans are not serious.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

440. “The simplest solution to the problem of race in America? Romantic love. Not friendship. Not the kind of safe, shallow love where the objective is that both people remain comfortable. But real deep romantic love, the kind that twists you and wrings you out and makes you breathe through the nostrils of your beloved.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

441. “Defiance is like marijuana – it is not a bad thing when it is used right.” The.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

442. “When we say fathers are “helping,” we are suggesting that child care is a mother’s territory, into which fathers valiantly venture. It is not.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

443. “Anyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided I would now call myself a Happy African Feminist. Then a dear friend told me that calling myself a feminist meant that I hated men. So I decided I would now be a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men. Of.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

444. “You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

445. “Happiness becomes a weakness because it leaves you defenseless in the face of grief.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

446. “You lower your voice when you speak. You talk in whispers.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

447. “I am writing about my father in the past tense, and I cannot believe I am writing about my father in the past tense.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

448. “It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

449. “He had first been excited by Facebook, ghosts of old friends suddenly morphing to life with wives and husbands and children, and photos trailed by comments. But he began to be appalled by the air of unreality, the careful manipulation of images to create a parallel life, pictures that people had taken with Facebook in mind, placing in the background the things of which they were proud.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

450. “A friend sends me a line from my novel: ‘Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.’ How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie