Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“she always chose peace over truth,”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The higher you go, the fewer women there are.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I must have been an annoying child.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You deserve to take up space.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“For me, feminism is always contextual.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Stories matter. Many stories matter.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I'm a nice middle-class girl.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“It was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Make dressing a question of taste and attractiveness instead of a question of morality.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Lots of liberal white folks are looking for black friends.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“America’s ladder of races, Jewish is white but also some rungs below white. A bit confusing,”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Aokpe will always be special because it was the reason Kambili and Jaja first came to Nsukka.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“A quickening inside her, a dawning. She realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likeable, her job is to be her full self, a…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Ferdinand had a steely, amoral face; if one examined his hands, the blood of his enemies might be found crusted under his…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“They had both wanted it to happen and they both wished it had not; what mattered now was that nobody else should…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Don't think that raising her feminist means forcing her to reject femininity. Feminism and femininity are not exclusive.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty,…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression,…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

When the writing is going well, I'm obsessive. I don't shower, I don't take phone calls, I hardly respond to text messages,…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The idea that sex is something a woman gives a man, and she loses something when she does that, which again for…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Nigerian women came to America and became wild, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote in one post; it was an unpleasant truth but one…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“CHAPTER 1 Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival; the physically stronger…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: 'You can have ambition, but not too much.…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Oh, my God,’ she said, between sobs. ‘Oh, my God.’ Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna’s…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“It’s true. And they don’t just spend a lot, they expect to spend a lot. I met this guy the other day,…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“in Feminism Lite, that men are naturally superior but should be expected to ‘treat women well’. No. No. No. There must be…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie