Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes - page 2

...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. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
I don't think sexism is worse than racism, it's impossible even to compare ... It's that I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don't feel in my fight against racism. My friends, my family, they get racism, they get it. The people I'm close to who are not black get it. But I find that with sexism you are constantly having to explain, justify, convince, make a case for.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
And even though I helped to clean the wounded, I had never taken anyone into my room.But I took this girl into my room.Her name was chinasa.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Feminism is not that men and women are the same. If men and women are the same, we won't have sexism. We are just stating the differences and people should stop giving negative value to all the attributes that women have. It's not that men and women are the same but they've equally human.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing 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
I am a person who believes in asking questions, in not conforming for the sake of conforming. I am deeply dissatisfied - about so many things, about injustice, about the way the world works - and in some ways, my dissatisfaction drives my storytelling.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I was stained by failure. (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
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
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
In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn't married, we just think he hasn't come around to making his pick.
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
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
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know. (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
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?
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