Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.

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

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