Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes - page 3

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again.

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

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

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I look to stories for consolation,the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up everyday;as template for life;for news on how others live;for reminders that life's mysteries have no key.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman's despair.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I don't think I'm more inherently likely to do domestic work, or childcare ... It doesn't come pre-programmed in your vagina, right?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Because we write fiction we mine our souls. Of course you put yourself into your fiction, your fiction is you.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is the kind of capitalism I hate. This is bullying capitalism. Look, I am Igbo, I come from a trading culture. My people are merchant and I'm all for buying and selling. But capitalism has to be a fair exchange. (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

I cannot control even the dreams that I have made.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The truth has become an insult.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A gorgeous pitless account of love, violence and betrayal.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A successful story for me exist in a moral universe, not one where goodness always triumph, because that would be false but one with an inherent awareness of goodness.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My own definition is a feminist is a man or woman who says 'yes,there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it,we must do better.All of us,women and men,must do better.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

So true--when people see an absence of women in engineering, science and technology, then it becomes self-reinforcing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Please love by giving and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you'll know. You'll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don't silence that voice. Dare to take.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Teach her that the idea of 'gender roles' is absolute nonsense. Do not ever tell her that she should or should not do something because she is a girl.
'Because you are a girl' is never reason for anything.
Ever. (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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