Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over it becomes normal.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are the little things, but sometimes it is the little things that sting the most.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask what we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak-- a hard man.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

​If we do something over and over again, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over again, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitors, then at some point we will all think, even if unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy. If we keep seeing only men as heads of corporations, it starts to seem 'natural' that only men should be heads of corporations. ​

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don’t think like that. I don’t even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman's crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought—to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet—and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother’s behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in that kitchen. But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo's expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought.

~ 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. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

femelu could not understand this, her mother’s ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child was the exception rather than the rule.

~ 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

Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She seemed so happy, so at peace, and I wondered how anybody around me could feel that way when liquid fire was raging inside me, when fear was mingling with hope and clutching itself around my ankles.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

...she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine, but had instead, a firm reed of goodness.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Greatness depends on where you are coming from.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Red Cross irritated Ugwu, the least they could do was ask Biafrans their preferred foods rather than sending so much bland flour.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Be a full person. Motherhood is a glorious gift, but do not define yourself solely by motherhood. Be a full person. Your child will benefit from that.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

If the justification for controlling women's bodies were about women themselves, then it would be understandable. If, for example, the reason was 'women should not wear short skirts because they can get cancer if they do.' Instead the reason is not about women, but about men. Women must be 'covered up' to protect men. I find this deeply dehumanizing because it reduces women to mere props used to manage the appetites of men.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A father is as much a verb as a mother.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Talk to her about sex, and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward, but it is necessary.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't.

~ 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

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie