749 Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Let’s have a child,” he said again. “A little girl just like you, and we will call her Obianuju because she will complete us.

There were people who were born with an inability to be tangled up in dark emotions, in complications, and Iloba was one of them. For such people, Obinze felt both admiration and boredom.

I thought then of catechism classes, about chanting the answer to a question, an answer that was “because he has said it and his word is true.” I could not remember the question.

Those plates, with their amateur finishing, the slight lumpiness of the edges, would never be shown in the presence of guests in Nigeria. He still was not sure whether Emenike had become a person who believed that something was beautiful because it was handmade by poor people in a foreign country, or whether he had simply learned to pretend so.

Beware the danger of what I call Feminism Lite. It is the idea of conditional female equality. Please reject this entirely. It is a hollow, appeasing, and bankrupt idea. Being a feminist is like being pregnant. You either are or you are not. You either believe in the full equality of men and women or you do not. Feminism.

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.

We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.

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. We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.