Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

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

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

I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.

I was stained by failure.

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.

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

Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in "real" African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

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.

Stories matter. Many stories matter.

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

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

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

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.

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

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

...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.

The higher you go, the fewer women there are.

One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.

I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.

If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.

The truth has become an insult.

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.

At some point I was a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men and Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss and High Heels for Herself and Not For Men.

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.

We have a world full of women who are unable to exhale fully because they have for so long been conditioned to fold themselves into shapes to make themselves likeable.

I am just as human as the man.

Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love, and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don’t teach boys to do the same?

Sometimes life begins when the marriage ends

Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. . . And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.

If we don't place the straitjacket of gender roles on young children, we give them space to reach their full potential.

The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.

Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.

That a woman claims not to be feminist does not diminish the necessity of feminism. If anything, it makes us see the extent of the problem, the successful reach of patriarchy.

There must be more than male benevolence as the basis for a woman's well-being.

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans.

Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.

A man who would be intimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.

We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.

Now imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.

But by far the worst thing we do to males — by making them feel they have to be hard — is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.

Ifemelu thought about the expression "sweet girl." Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.

But by far the worst thing we do to males--by making them feel they have to be hard--is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.

And then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males.

Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.