Chi­ma­man­da Ngo­zi Adi­chie Quotes

“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”

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

“Maybe it’s time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.”

“That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”

“The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, the higher you go, the fewer women there are.”

“Greatness depends on where you are coming from.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“… 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.”

“A world of happier men and 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.”

“She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe.”

““ We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage.”

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

“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.”

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”

“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.”

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

“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.”

“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.”

“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a 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.”

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”

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

“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.”

“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

“Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.”

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

“I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”

“Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not “if only.” Not “as long as.” I matter equally. Full stop.”

“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?”

“I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.”

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

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

“She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The truth has become an insult.”

“Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women.”

“I'm chasing you. I'm going to chase you until you give this a chance.”

“Academics were not intellectuals; they were not curious, they built their stolid tents of specialized knowledge and stayed securely in them.”

“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.”

“There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”

“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.”

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

“To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.”

“There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.”

“What if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead of gender?”

“… 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.”

“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?”