749 Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service.

Like how the government of General Abacha was using its foreign policy to legitimize itself in the eyes of other African countries.

Chudi ne mérite nulle louange ou gratitude particulières, et toi non plus d’ailleurs : vous avez tous les deux choisi de mettre un enfant au monde, et la responsabilité de cet enfant vous appartient à tous les deux à parts égales. Ce serait différent si tu étais mère célibataire, que ce soit par choix ou par la force des choses, parce que tu n’aurais pas alors la possibilité de « faire les choses ensemble ». Mais tu ne devrais pas agir en « mère célibataire » si tu n’en es pas réellement une.

To take "charity" for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know - perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this.

I lived in Boston until last year,” he said, in a falsely low-key way, because “Boston” was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, “I was in New Haven,” in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale.

She will listen to BBC radio and hear the accounts of the deaths and the riots - "religious with undertones of ethnic tension" the voice will say. And she will fling the radio to the wall and a fierce red rage will run through her at how it has all been packaged and sanitized and made to fit into so few words, all those bodies.

Voilà ce qui devrait être ton postulat féministe de base : je compte. Je compte autant. Pas « à condition que ». Pas « tant que ». Je compte autant. Un point c’est tout.

« Parce que tu es une fille » ne sera jamais une bonne raison pour quoi que ce soit. Jamais.