Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer known for her novel, “Half of a Yellow Sun”, which details the Nigerian Civil War’s impact.
Born in 1977 in Enugu, she moved to Nsukka with her family. Inspired by Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”, Adichie moved to the U.S. for her education, studying various subjects, including creative writing.
She wrote a play, “For Love of Biafra” and her debut novel, “Purple Hibiscus”, narrates a teenager’s life under her strict religious father.
Her second novel, based on her parents’ experiences during the Nigeria-Biafra war, became an international sensation, winning major awards.
Adichie also wrote “Americanah” and several nonfiction works, including “We Should All Be Feminists”, a part of which was featured in a Beyoncé song.
She also penned “Notes on Grief”, mourning her father’s death.
Here is a top collection of quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Best Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
This was love, to be eager for tomorrow. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Never speak of marriage as an achievement. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
He was not living his life; life was living him. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Culture does not make people. People make culture. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Your life belongs to you and you alone. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The only reason race matters is because of racism. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Greatness depends on where you are coming from. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
You can have ambition But not too much. You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Famous Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
My own definition is a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.’ ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
You Americans, always peering under people’s beds to look for communism. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness? ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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? ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We never actively remember death,′ Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Women need to know that they matter. They matter equally. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I didn’t know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Top Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
Gender and class are different. Poor men still have the privileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
And it’s wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It’s possible to love something and still condescend to it. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Privilege blinds, because it’s in its nature to blind. Don’t let it blind you too often. Sometimes you will need to push it aside in order to see clearly. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
You have to do more than go there and adopt a child or show us pictures of children with flies in their eyes. That simplifies Africa. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Our society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure. While a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Popular Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
If she sees you reading, she will understand that reading is valuable. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in real African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the private in Nigeria. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Wise Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Because I am female, I’m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Feminist: A person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
He used to make me feel that nothing I said was witty enough or sarcastic enough or smart enough. He was always struggling to be different, even when it didn’t matter. It was as if he was performing his life instead of living his life. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Thought-Provoking Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I don’t believe that art and politics or social issues must be separated. In writing about marriage, for example, money can be a big factor, and money is linked to earning, and earning is influenced by politics. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle? ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
In teaching her about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints. Saintliness is not a prerequisite for dignity. People who are unkind and dishonest are still human, and still deserve dignity. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Never ever accept ‘Because You Are A Woman’ as a reason for doing or not doing anything. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Powerful Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I have many problems in my life, but I don’t think that identity is one of them. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
At some point I was a HappyAfricanFeminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognizing how we are. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Inspiring Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
To choose to write is to reject silence. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
If you followed the media you’d think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that’s not the case; so it’s important to engage with the other Africa. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. 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. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I was stained by failure. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We teach girls shame; close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they’re already guilty of something. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books telling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer guides for men about pleasing women. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Positive Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
They themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was a mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
You deserve to take up space. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn’t that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
You can’t write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
So these were the 93 top Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie quotes and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on DJ Khaled quotes and Leonard Ravenhill quotes.
