749 Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?

You can’t nice your way to being loved.

He was left-leaning and well-meaning, crippled by his acknowledgement of his own many privileges. He never allowed himself to have an opinion. 'Yes, I see what you mean,' he said often.

Ginika told her that ‘fat’ in America was a bad word, heaving with moral judgement like ‘stupid’ or ‘bastard,’ and not a mere description liked ‘short’ or ‘tall.’ So, she had banished the word ‘fat’ from her vocabulary…She said the word ‘fat’ slowly, funneling it back and forward, and thought about all the other things she had learned not to say aloud in America.

He felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.

There was a part of him (her) that dreamed, and he (she) was not sure if that part could ever retreat into an interminable silence.

You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.

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.

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.