The Thing Around Your Neck Quotes

“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 wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same—condescending.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“How can you love somebody and yet want to manage the amount of happiness that person is allowed?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Is it a good life, Daddy?” Nkiru has taken to asking lately on the phone, with that faint, vaguely troubling American accent. It is not good or bad, I tell her, it is simply mine. And that is what matters.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“How can a person claim to love you and yet want you to do things that suit only them? Udenna was like that.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think that they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one’s child were the exception rather than the rule.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She imagines the cocoa brown of Nnedi's eyes lighting up, her lips moving quickly, explaining that riots do not happen in a vacuum, that religion and ethnicity are often politicized because the ruler is safe if the hungry ruled are killing one another.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She wanted Azuka to learn the ways of these foreigners, since people ruled over others not because they were better people but because they had better guns;”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you rooted for the following, in this order: women of color, black men, and white women, before, finally, white men—which meant you never rooted for white men.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol—in small amounts.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“The Tanzanian told her that all fiction was therapy, some sort of therapy, no matter what anybody said.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She wanted to interrupt and tell him how unnecessary it was, this bloodying and binding, this turning faith into a pugilistic exercise; to tell him that life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

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

“Ikenna, I have come to realize, is a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“He said "see" as if it meant something more than what one did with one's eyes.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Como se pode amar alguém e ao mesmo tempo querer controlar a quantidade de felicidade que é permitida a essa pessoa?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Life was a struggle with ourselves more than with a spear-wielding Satan; that belief was a choice for our conscience always to be sharpened.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“There were emotions she wanted to hold in the palm of her hand that were simply no longer there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots - "religious with undertones of ethnic tension" the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman's crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more than the average salary plus stock options because they were desperately trying to look diverse.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“She stood in line outside the American embassy in Lagos, staring straight ahead, barely moving, a blue plastic file of documents tucked under her arm. She was the forty-eighth person in the line of about two hundred that trailed from the closed gates of the American embassy all the way past the smaller, vine-encrusted gates of the Czech embassy. She did not notice the newspaper vendors who blew whistles and pushed The Guardian, Thenews, and The Vanguard in her face. Or the beggars who walked up and down holding out enamel plates. Or the ice-cream bicycles that honked. She did not fan herself with a magazine or swipe at the tiny fly hovering near her ear. When the man standing behind her tapped her on the back and asked, “Do you have change, abeg, two tens for twenty naira?” she stared at him for a while, to focus, to remember where she was, before she shook her head and said, “No.” The air hung heavy with moist heat. It weighed on her head, made it even more difficult to keep her mind blank, which Dr. Balogun had said yesterday was what she would have to do. He had refused to give her any more tranquilizers because she needed to be alert for the visa interview. It was easy enough for him to say that, as though she knew how to go about keeping her mind blank, as though it was in her power, as though she invited those images of her son Ugonna’s small, plump body crumpling before her, the splash on his chest so red she wanted to scold him about playing with the palm oil in the kitchen. Not that he could even reach up to the shelf where she kept oils and spices, not that he could unscrew the cap on the plastic bottle of palm oil. He was only four years old.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck

“Even at ten you knew that some people can take up too much space by simply being, that by existing, some people can stifle others.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck