A good education isn't the same thing as making the whole damn world something to be explained!
it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.
Could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.
Your life belongs to you and you alone.
Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally.
Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man?
What is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a people.
We have fried chicken in common? Do you realize how loaded fried chicken is as a metaphor here?
We also need to question the idea of marriage as a prize to women, because that is the basis of these absurd debates. If we stopped conditioning women to see marriage as a prize, then we would have fe...
To make sure she doesn't inherit shame from you, you have to free yourself of your own inherited shame. And I know how terribly difficult that is. In every culture in the world, female sexuality is ab...
These people, they make you become aggressive just to hold your dignity.
There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther aw...
The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those att...
Tell her that kindness matters. Praise her when she is kind to other people. But teach her that kindness must never be taken for granted. Tell her that she, too, deserves the kindness of others. Teach...
Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions.
So if you're going to write about race, you have to make sure it's so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn't read between the lines won't even know it's about race.
She looked away, worried that the crush of emotions she had felt while he was speaking would now converge on her face. Of course you don’t. You like your life, she said. I live my life. Oh, how myster...
STRONG because that is what black women are supposed to be in America.
Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.
Later Ginika said, You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa