Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah (2013)

17 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.

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

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
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
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
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
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
Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie