Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn’t exist, so I didn’t leave.”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that kindness must never be…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He…

— 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

“He was no longer sure, he had in fact never been sure, whether he liked his life because he really did or…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Nigerian politics has been, since the military dictatorships, largely non-ideological. Rather than a battle of ideas, it is about who can pump…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The second tool is a question: Can you reverse X and get the same results? ... If the answer is yes, then…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The rude stranger in the supermarket--who knew what problems he was wrestling with, haggard and thin-lipped as he was--had intended to offend…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Some people ask, 'Why the word 'feminist'? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?'…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Maybe it’s time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“His was the coiled, urgent restlessness of a person who believed that fate had mistakenly allotted him a place below his true…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

There can be an extremist idea of purity. It's so easy to fall afoul of the ridiculously high standard set there.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

To choose to write is to reject silence.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“She wanted Azuka to learn the ways of these foreigners, since people ruled over others not because they were better people but…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I think my first general rule is that most of my experiences are not that interesting. It's usually other people's experiences. It's…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“femelu could not understand this, her mother’s ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality”

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“I prefer Ms. because it is similar to Mr. A man is Mr. whether married or not, a woman is Ms. whether…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“What if the parents, from the beginning, taught both children to cook Indomie? Cooking, by the way, is a useful and practical…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“But here is a sad truth: Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have…

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie