Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - People Quotes

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts—it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved—but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.

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
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
Culture does not make people. People make culture.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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
There are people... who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.... The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie