Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes

Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.
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
There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.
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
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
Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing.
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
Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. 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.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The single story creates stereotypes, and 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
I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.
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
Greatness depends on where you are coming from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.
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)
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
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
You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie