Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

There was a helplessness to his joy, the same kind of helplessness as in that woman's despair.

A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.

When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain.

"I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously.

Rain splashed across the floor of the veranda, even though the sun blazed and I had to narrow my eyes to look out the door of Aunty Ifeoma’s living room. Mama used to tell Jaja and me that God was undecided about what to send, rain or sun. We would sit in our rooms and look out at the raindrops glinting with sunlight, waiting for God to decide.

Ours was an ancient story, the woman wants the baby and the man doesn’t want the baby and a middle ground does not exist.

"The white missionaries brought us their god," Amaka was saying. "Which was the same color as them, worshiped in their language and packaged in the boxes they made. Now that we take their god back to them, shouldn't we at least repackage it?"

That night when I bathed, with a bucket half full of rainwater, I did not scrub my left hand, the hand that Father Amadi had held gently to slide the flower off my finger. I did not heat the water, either, because I was afraid that the heating coil would make the rainwater lose the scent of the sky. I sang as I bathed. There were more earthworms in the bathtub, and I left them alone, watching the water carry them and send them down the drain.

Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet.’

for a moment I felt an intense desire to pass out and escape my life

I don’t think sexism is worse than racism, it’s impossible even to compare ... It’s that I feel lonely in my fight against sexism, in a way that I don’t feel in my fight against racism. My friends, my family, they get racism, they get it. The people I’m close to who are not black get it. But I find that with sexism you are constantly having to explain, justify, convince, make a case for.

...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.

A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside me and I was spurting fear.

Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing

Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.