Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

Never ever accept 'Because You Are A Woman' as a reason for doing or not doing anything.

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.

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.

Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.

To choose to write is to reject silence.

If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly.

There are people who dislike you because you do not dislike yourself.

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.

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.

Culture does not make people. People make culture.

You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?' Aunty Ifeka said. 'Your life belongs to you and you alone.

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.

You can have ambition But not too much You should aim to be successful But not too successful Otherwise you will threaten the man

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.

This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.

There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.

I’m very feminist in the way I look at the world, and that worldview must somehow be part of my work.

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.

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be, rather than recognising how we are.

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.

She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.

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?

She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.

You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.

I have many problems in my life, but I don't think that identity is one of them.

Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.

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.

When we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

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.

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.

That her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out

Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.

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

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

You deserve to take up space.

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

Greatness depends on where you are coming from.

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.

Your life belongs to you and you alone.

How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told — are really dependent on power.

Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.

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.

I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes.

I am interested in challenging the mainstream ideas of what is beautiful and what is acceptable.