749 Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.

We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way.

They tell us race is an invention, that there is no genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroid. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, is race an invention or not?

Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.

If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise

it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.

Never' has come to say. 'Never' feels so unfairly punitive. For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

A friend sends me a line from my novel: 'Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.' How odd to find it so exquisitely painful to read my own words.

Ugwu fumbled, awkwardly, for something to say. ‘Are you still writing your book, sah?’‘No.’‘”The World Was Silent When We Died”. It is a good title.’‘Yes, it is. It came from something Colonel Madu said once.’Richard paused. ‘The war isn’t my story to tell, really.’Ugwu nodded. He had never thought that it was.