Best quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. Adichie, a feminist, has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014). Her most recent books are Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017), Zikora (2020) and Notes on Grief (2021). In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Some of the best quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are listed below.

1. “All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2. “And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. “Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4. “Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. “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.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
6. “But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more harshly than we judge powerful men. And Feminism Lite enables this.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
7. “But race is not biology; race is sociology. Race is not genotype; race is phenotype. Race matters because of racism. And racism is absurd because it’s about how you look. Not about the blood you have. It’s about the shape of your nose and the kink of your hair.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
8. “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
9. “Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
10. “Feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
11. “Feminism for me is not an exclusive little party that you get to go to when you’ve read the right books.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
12. “Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
13. “First we need to calm down, breathe, and get over ourselves.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
14. “For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
15. “For progress to be made, I think it’s necessary to reach out to people who don’t necessarily agree.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
16. “From the very beginning, I think it’s been quite clear that there’s no way I could possibly say that trans women are not women. It’s the sort of thing to me that’s obvious, so I start from that obvious premise.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
17. “Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. 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.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
18. “How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
19. “How was it possible to miss something you no longer wanted?” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
20. “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
21. “I am angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change, but in addition to being angry, I’m also hopeful because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to make and remake themselves for the better.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
22. “I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
23. “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.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
24. “I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
25. “I don’t want to sit with someone who thinks that women are objects. I just don’t want to.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
26. “I find that I’m lonely in my rage about sexism. And that loneliness informs my rage.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
27. “I have my father’s lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddy’s girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasn’t crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my father’s.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
28. “I know I’m able to have empathy for men who have been assaulted, who’ve suffered. I don’t need to imagine that they’re my brother or my husband.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
29. “I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
30. “I look at the world through eyes that are very alert to gender injustice, and I always will.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
31. “I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
32. “I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
33. “I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn’t matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
34. “I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho, and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
35. “I think people are frightened of saying what they think, and I think that’s a bad thing for society.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
36. “I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
37. “I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
38. “I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
39. “I’m chasing you. I’m going to chase you until you give this a chance.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
40. “I’ve always been the kind of person who thinks that men and women are equal, full stop.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
41. “If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
42. “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
43. “If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
44. “If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
45. “If you start thinking about being likable, you are not going to tell your story honestly.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
46. “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
47. “In the recent US elections, we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter Law. And if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law, it was really about a man and a woman doing the same job, being equally qualified and the man being paid more because he is a man. So, in a literal way, men rule the world. And this made sense a thousand years ago. Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival. The physically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men in general are physically stronger; of course, there are many exceptions. But today we live in a vastly different world. The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person, it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person, the more innovative person, and there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, to be creative, to be innovative. We have evolved, but it seems to me that our ideas of gender have not evolved.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
48. “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
49. “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.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
50. “It was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
51. “It’s not about individual women; it’s about a system.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
52. “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
53. “Love is the most important. The most necessary human emotion. Not just romantic love. Love. The ability of human beings to connect.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
54. “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanise.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
55. “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
56. “Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
57. “Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
58. “Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get your hands dirty way.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
59. “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.’” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
60. “My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe… I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
61. “Never ever accept ‘because you are a woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
62. “Never speak of marriage as an achievement.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
63. “Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
64. “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
65. “Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
66. “Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
67. “People will selectively use ‘tradition’ to justify anything.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
68. “Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in real African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
69. “Please do not twist yourself into shapes to please. Don’t do it. If someone likes that version of you, that version of you that is false and holds back, then they actually just like that twisted shape, and not you. And the world is such a gloriously multifaceted, diverse place that there are people in the world who will like you, the real you, as you are.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
70. “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
71. “Privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
72. “Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
73. “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
74. “Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
75. “Some men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by how boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not ‘naturally’ in charge as men.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
76. “Some people ask: ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general – but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
77. “Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
78. “Teach her never to universalize her own standards or experiences. Teach her that her standards are for her alone, and not for other people. This is the only necessary form of humility: the realization that difference is normal.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
79. “Teach her that ‘gender roles’ is absolute nonsense.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
80. “That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
81. “The idea that sex is something a woman gives a man, and she loses something when she does that, which again for me is nonsense. I want us to raise girls differently where boys and girls start to see sexuality as something that they own, rather than something that a boy takes from a girl.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
82. “The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
83. “The manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
84. “The only reason race matters is because of racism.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
85. “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
86. “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
87. “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
88. “The truth has become an insult.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
89. “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
90. “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
91. “There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
92. “There was a feeling I wanted to feel that I did not feel.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
93. “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.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
94. “These are little things but sometimes it’s the little things that sting the most.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
95. “This was love, to be eager for tomorrow.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
96. “To choose to writes is to reject silence.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
97. “To have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
98. “We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
99. “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
100. “We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
101. “We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
102. “We teach girls shame. ‘Close your legs. Cover yourself’. We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
103. “When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
104. “Why did people ask ‘What is it about?’ as if a novel had to be about only one thing.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
105. “Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can’t we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied – that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
106. “Women need to know that they matter. They matter equally.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
107. “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
108. “You could say anything at any time to anyone.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
109. “You deserve to take up space.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
110. “You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
111. “You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man… Your life belongs to you and you alone.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
112. “Your standard ideologies will not always fit your life. Because life is messy.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie