Welcome to our collection of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes! Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author of novels, short stories, and nonfiction. She is known for her award-winning works such as Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, as well as her TEDx talks. Her words are inspiring, thought-provoking, and empowering. Here you will find some of her best quotes that will motivate you on your journey.
Inspiring Quotes from Nigerian Author Chimamanda Adichie
⬛”If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.”
⬛”Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”
⬛”Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
⬛”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.”
⬛”Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
⬛”Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”
“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
⬛”The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes on feminsim
⬛”‘You know, you’re a feminist.’ It was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone—the same tone with which a person would say, ‘You’re a supporter of terrorism.‘” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we should begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Gender, as it functions today, is a grave injustice.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. My great-grandmother, from stories I’ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and married the man of her choice. She refused, protested, spoke up when she felt she was being deprived of land and access because she was female. She did not know that word feminist. But it doesn’t mean she wasn’t one. More of us should reclaim that word. The best feminist I know is my brother Kene, who is also a kind, good-looking, and very masculine young man.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights or something like that?’ Because that would be… a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not the case. We don’t teach boys to care about being likable.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”What if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead of gender?” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes that break stereotypes
⬛”But by far the worst thing we do to males — by making them feel they have to be hard — is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We police girls.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“We praise girls for virginity but we don’t praise boys for virginity .” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We teach girls shame. ‘Close your legs. Cover yourself.’ We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something.” — 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. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise, you will threaten the man.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”What struck me – with her and with many other female American friends I have – is how invested they are in being ‘liked’. How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very important and that this ‘likeable’ trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing too loudly.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don’t teach boys to do the same?” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes about race
⬛”These white people think that everybody has their mental problems.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I can’t believe it. My president is black like me.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes that inspire us to change
⬛”All of us, women and men, must do better.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Culture does not make people. People make culture.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I am also hopeful because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”It is easy to say, ‘But women can just say no to all this.’ But the reality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”She was inside this silence and she was safe.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”Silence hangs over us, but … a different kind of silence, one that lets me breathe. ” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”When a house is on fire, you run out before the roof collapses on your head.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
⬛”You could say anything at any time to anyone. ” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Most Famous Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
⬛”Culture does not make people. People make culture. If the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.”
⬛”For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.”
⬛”I think you travel to search and you come back ‘home’ to find yourself there.”
⬛”I’ve always been the kind of person who thinks that men and women are equal, full stop.”
⬛”Never ever accept ‘because you are a woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything.”
⬛”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.”
⬛”There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
⬛”This was love a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
⬛”We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”
⬛”Your feminist premise should be I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only.’ Not ‘as long as.’ I matter equally. Full stop.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on Racism
⬛”Because when there is true equality, resentment does not exist.”
⬛”Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
⬛”Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”
⬛”The manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not.”
⬛”There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on Feminism and Gender Expectations
⬛“I don’t think of myself as a feminist activist… I think of myself fundamentally as a storyteller. I’m not a feminist activist; it’s not a label. I’m feminist, fiercely so. I will always be. I have always been.”
⬛“Some people ask: ‘Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be… a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.”
⬛“We teach girls shame. ‘Close your legs. Cover yourself.’ We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”
“Feminism isn’t a cloak that I put on in the morning and take off at certain times. It’s who I am.”
⬛“Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”
⬛“I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations.”
⬛“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”
⬛“I look at the world through eyes that are very alert to gender injustice, and I always will.”
⬛“Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”
⬛“My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.’”
⬛“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.”
⬛“Women need to know that they matter. They matter equally.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on Marriage and Men
⬛“A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick.”
⬛“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.”
⬛“I know I’m able to have empathy for men who have been assaulted, who’ve suffered. I don’t need to imagine that they’re my brother or my husband.”
⬛“Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?”
⬛“Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.”
⬛“Never speak of marriage as an achievement.”
⬛“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”
⬛“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me Your life belongs to you and you alone.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on Africa
⬛“If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.”
⬛“You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa.”
⬛“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 Quotes that will Make You Think
⬛“If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.”
⬛“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity.”
⬛“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”
⬛“I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.”
⬛“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”
⬛“Teach her that if you criticize X in women but do not criticize X in men, then you do not have a problem with X, you have a problem with women.”
⬛“The knowledge of cooking does not come pre-installed in a vagina.”
⬛“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”
⬛“Why did people ask What is it about as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes on History and Locality
⬛“I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good argument about ideas.Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.”
⬛“When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”
Chimamanda Adichie quotes on women
⬛“I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.”
⬛“Minister to the world in a way that can change it. Minister radically in a real, active, practical, get your hands dirty way.”
⬛“Never ever accept ‘Because You Are A Woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything.”
Chimamanda Adichie quotes on money
⬛“There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.”
⬛“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation.”
⬛“Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes About Books
⬛“All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women.”
“Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.”
⬛“I had people read it early on and, you know, well-meaning people said to me, you should take out the blogs. I didn’t get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me – it was sort of like a “tone it down, make it easier to swallow” kind of thing. And I just thought if I do that then it’s not the book I want to write.”
⬛“I think it’s important to humanize history; fiction can help us remember. A lot of books I’ve read in the past have been so much more important than textbooks – there is an emotional connection with one particular person. I’m very much of a research-is-important type of fiction writer, even for contemporary fiction. I wrote about blogs in America and I’ve never blogged. But I read many, many blogs – usually about feminist things, or about race, or about hair.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes About Choices
⬛“Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important.”
⬛“Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care.”
⬛“Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
⬛“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’ Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices, always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now, marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support, but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?”
⬛“Why must we always talk about race anyway? Can’t we just be human beings? And Professor Hunk replied – that is exactly what white privilege is, that you can say that. Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes About Culture
⬛“Culture does not make people – people make culture. So if it is in fact true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, we must make it our culture. A feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it. We must do better.”
⬛“I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.”
⬛“Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in “real” African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.”
⬛“When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. “We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes About Nigeria
⬛“At about the age of seven … I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather: how lovely it was that the sun had come out. This despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria; we didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.”
⬛“I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.”
⬛“I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria – it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.”
⬛“If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.”
⬛“In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he – and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya – would never leave.”
⬛“There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes About Poverty
⬛“Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.”
⬛“I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.”
⬛“If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.”
⬛“It is easy to romanticize poverty, to see poor people as inherently lacking agency and will. It is easy to strip them of human dignity, to reduce them to objects of pity. This has never been clearer than in the view of Africa from the American media, in which we are shown poverty and conflicts without any context.”
⬛“One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes About Writing
⬛“I had people read it early on and, you know, well-meaning people said to me, you should take out the blogs. I didn’t get much positive feedback. Only because most of these people were protective of me – it was sort of like a “tone it down, make it easier to swallow” kind of thing. And I just thought if I do that then it’s not the book I want to write.”
⬛“I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn’t that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story.”
⬛“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 not that entirely conscious. Somebody tells me a story or, you know, repeats an anecdote that somebody else told them and I just feel like I have to write it down so I don’t forget – that means for me, something made it fiction-worthy. Interesting things never happen to me, so maybe two or three times when they do, I have to use them, so I write them down.”
⬛“To choose to write is to reject silence.”
⬛“You can’t write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”
Verdict
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes are inspiring and thought-provoking. They encourage us to think beyond our current circumstances and to strive for a better future. Her words remind us that we have the power to make a difference in our lives and the world around us. Through her quotes, Adichie encourages us to be brave, to stand up for what is right, and to create a world that is more equal and just.