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

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

“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

“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

“...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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

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

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

“Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.”
― 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

“Her bladder felt painfully, solidly full, as though it would burst and release not urine but the garbled prayers she was muttering.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“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

“Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

“Eugene has to stop doing God's job. 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, Purple Hibiscus

“Oh, my God,’ she said, between sobs. ‘Oh, my God.’
Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna’s grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo’s house.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun

“لقد شعرت دائماً أنه من المستحيل التعامل بشكل صحيح مع مكان أو شخص بدون إستصحاب كل القصص عن ذلك المكان وذلك الشخص. تبعات النظرة الآحادية هي هذه: أنها تجرّد الناس من الكرامة. إنها تجعل إعترافنا بتساوي إنسانيتنا صعب. وهي تؤكد كم أننا مختلفون بدلاً عن كم نحن متشابهون.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Nnamabia seemed fine to me, slipping his money into his anus and all.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“If this is hatred, then it is very young. I has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun