Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

I knew how I was supposed to feel, but I did not know how I felt. It was not transcendental. There was a festering red pain between my legs. Somewhere in my consciousness, a mild triumph hovered, because it was over, finally it was over, and I had pushed out the baby. So animalistic, so violent—the push and pressure, the blood, the doctor urging me, the cranking and stretching of flesh and organ and bone.

This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see.

With him, she was at ease: her skin felt as though it was her right size. She told him how she very much wanted God to exist but feared He did not, how she worried that she should know what she wanted to do with her life but did not even know what she wanted to study at university. It seemed so natural, to talk to him about odd things. She had never done that before. The trust, so sudden and yet so complete, and the intimacy, frightened her.

A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved […] The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue.”

So true--when people see an absence of women in engineering, science and technology, then it becomes self-reinforcing.

"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.”

It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.

How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

My father told jokes and laughed and charmed everyone, and broke things and walked on the shards without knowing he had broken things.

Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewande. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned and went back upstairs, silently.

There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.

The truth has become an insult.

I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.

How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life.