Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie > Quotes

“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
― 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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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

“...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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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

“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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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, Purple Hibiscus

“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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know. ”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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

“Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. 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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“...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, Purple Hibiscus

“Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet 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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

“I was stained by failure.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
― 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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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, Half of a Yellow Sun

“There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

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

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

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

“There are people who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not crawl, once”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus