Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
He was already looking at their relationship through the lens of the past tense. It puzzled her, the ability of romantic love to mutate, how quickly a loved one could become a stranger. Where did the love go? Perhaps real love was familial, somehow, linked to blood, since love for children did not die as romantic love did.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It's exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?' Aunty Ifeka said. 'Your life belongs to you and you alone.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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 is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Why did people ask 'What is it about?' as if a novel had to be about only one thing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie