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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
221 quotes
“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always longed to be known, truly known by another human being.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'I have always longed to be known' kwit.org ( March 4, 2025)
“Women in general are more likely to have richer interior lives and are also socialized to just sort of embrace more complexity emotionally.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'I have always longed to be known' kwit.org ( March 4, 2025 )
“Writing fiction is the love of my life. It's the thing that I think gives me meaning.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'I have always longed to be known' YPR+ ( March 4, 2025)
“I’ve always been willing to take the consequences of speaking my mind. ... No, no, no. I said what I believe.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I’ve Always Been Willing To Take The Consequences Of Speaking My Mind’ Global upfront newspaper (March 2, 2025)
“Social media has reshaped the traditional power dynamic by giving some access to the powerless, it has also made it easy to mistake the loudest voices for the truest.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2025 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘I’ve Always Been Willing To Take The Consequences Of Speaking My Mind’ Global upfront newspaper (March 2, 2025)
“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 (born 1977) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Happy Birthday Chimamanda Adichie: Powerful Quotes From The Bestselling Author The guardian(15 Sep 2018)
“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Happy Birthday Chimamanda Adichie: Powerful Quotes From The Bestselling Author The guardian(15 Sep 2018)
“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 (born 1977) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Happy Birthday Chimamanda Adichie: Powerful Quotes From The Bestselling Author The guardian(15 Sep 2018)
“I feel that I have been fortunate to have found success, and I also want the young writers to have what I did not have when I was starting out my writing career … Writing doesn’t exist in a vacuum; we talk about politics, everything.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminism for me is about justice; it’s about the idea that all human beings are equal… Feminism just means equality of opportunity.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am not apologetic for being a Nigerian. I won’t apologise for it; it’s who and what I am.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think it’s important. Just reading the entries for my workshop—sometimes it’s very sad to see that people don’t know very much about their own writers. I’m reading the entries now—it’s depressing. I know people in Nigeria who say, “I don’t read Nigerian fiction”—and they say it with prid”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s true everywhere. In Nigeria, people ask what can we do to make people read like they do abroad. I tell them, it’s a problem everywhere. When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins University and taught freshman writing, students just didn’t read. I would ask what are you reading, and they’d say Catcher in the Rye or something they had to read for school. When I asked what do you read for fun, they would be blank.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The year was interesting, and I met very lovely people. I was grateful for the library, but the program was not right for me. It took doing an academic program to make me realize that. I felt strait-jacketed, not very connected to the real world in many ways. I respect academic programs, but they are not for me.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No , most are set in the U.S.—except for “Cell One” and “The Headstrong Historian.” I’ve written quite a bit about Nigerians in the U.S. When I set out to write about America, I didn’t feel called to do a novel. I like stories, the kind of prose that is in touch with poetry.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father tells a story about his father dying in a refugee camp. His father was a titled man in Igboland, which meant that he was a great man. He had one of the highest titles a man could have. But his hometown fell, so he had to leave and go to a refugee camp, and he died and he was buried in a mass grave. Which is just heartbreaking for a man, particularly a man like him. My father, who's the first son, and who takes his responsibilities very seriously, couldn't go to bury his father because the roads were occupied. He was in a different part of Biafra and so it took a year until ... he could go to the refugee camp. ... And he goes there and he says, 'I want to know where my father was buried.' And somebody waved very vaguely and said, 'Oh we buried the people there.' So it was a mass grave. So many people had died. And my father says he went there and he took a handful of sand, and he said he's kept the sand ever since. For me, that was one of the most moving things I had ever heard.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how warfare in Nigeria affected her family in "'Americanah' Author Explains 'Learning' To Be Black In The U.S." NPR (June 27, 2013)
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now 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.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it’s a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America. When you are black in America and you fall in love with a white person, race doesn’t matter when you’re alone together because it’s just you and your love. But the minute you step outside, race matters. But we don’t talk about it. We don’t even tell our white partners the small things that piss us off and the things we wish they understood better, because we’re worried they will say we’re overreacting, or we’re being too sensitive. And we don’t want them to say, Look how far we’ve come, just forty years ago it would have been illegal for us to even be a couple blah blah blah, because you know what we’re thinking when they say that? We’re thinking why the fuck should it ever have been illegal anyway? But we don’t say any of this stuff. We let it pile up inside our heads, and when we come to nice liberal dinners like this, we say that race doesn’t matter because that’s what we’re supposed to say, to keep our nice liberal friends comfortable.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source