Chi­ma­man­da Ngo­zi Adi­chie: Trending quotes (page 2)

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”