Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
221 quotes
“I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tears were so cheap now”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He would kill you, but he would do it slowly”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my dark day further darkened.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“for a moment I felt an intense desire to pass out and escape my life”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“was suspended in a place of no feeling,”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What did “It’s time to get married” mean, anyway? Why did she have to marry at all?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He rolled his eyes in a kind of disbelieving amusement. “What, the single friend will seduce the husband, or the single friend will make the wife want to be single again?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I made myself boneless and amenable. I spent weekends willing the landline next to my bed to ring. Often it didn’t. Then he would call, before midnight, to ask if I was still up, so he could visit and leave before dawn.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each morning, I coated concealer on the dark bags under my eyes. Most days, I caressed a bottle of Advil, longing for the translucent green pills, but knowing that I would never take them.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I didn’t question whether it was real, because I knew it was. I questioned where it had gone. How could emotions just change? Where did it go, the thing that used to be?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believed then that love had to feel like hunger to be true.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began to cry. Tears were so cheap now. How do some memories insist on themselves?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We scrub and scrape our armpits and upper lip and legs because we hate to have hair there. Then we pamper and treat the hair on our heads because we love hair there. But it’s all hair. It’s the wanting that makes the difference.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Zikky, it won’t be easy, but it won’t be as hard as you think. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We mostly spoke English; Igbo was for mimicking relatives and for saying painful things.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Respect: a starched deference, a string of ashen rituals. It was my mother who sat beside my father at weddings and ceremonies; it was her photo that appeared above the label of “wife” in the booklet his club published in his honor. Respect was her reward for acquiescing.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He said, “I thought you let me because you had protection.” I said, “What are you talking about? You know I stopped taking the pill because it made me fat, and I assumed you knew what it meant, what it could mean.” He said, “There was miscommunication.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In my head, there was a queue of emotions I could not name, wanting to be tried out one after the other.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A geyser of anxiety had erupted deep inside me and I was spurting fear.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only later did I see how, to survive, she wielded her niceness like a subtle sharp knife.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“was to remember like a brief blur my life as it once was, when I was only a daughter, not a mother.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father told jokes and laughed and charmed everyone, and broke things and walked on the shards without knowing he had broken things.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt light from relief, weightless, unburdened.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How swift the moment is when your life becomes a different life.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Symptoms can mean nothing if a mind just cannot.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And I never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her silence bruised the air between us.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source