Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Short Quotes

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Culture does not make people. People make culture.

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.

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

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
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

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

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know.

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
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
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
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
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
Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.

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
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