Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.(Opening page, 3)

Those plates, with their amateur finishing, the slight lumpiness of the edges, would never be shown in the presence of guests in Nigeria. He still was not sure whether Emenike had become a person who...

Tienen una energía desbordante, de veras, pero me temo que muy poca higiene». Le explicó que los hausas del norte eran gente muy digna, los igbos eran ariscos y amantes del dinero, y los yorubas eran...

Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men—cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over years they have been socialized...

Too much schooling ruins a woman; everyone knows that. It gives a woman a big head and she will start to insult her husband. What kind of wife will that be?

Try listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it's not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is. If you don't understa...

Try listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it’s not about you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just telling you what is.

Ugwu had saved them, the same way he saved old sugar cartons, bottle corks, even yam peels. It came with never having had much, she knew, the inability to let go of things, even things that were usele...

Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol—in small amounts.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: Thoughts on the Special White FriendOne great gift for the Zipped-Up Negro is The White Friend Who Gets It. Sadly, this is not as common as one would...

Was it the one with long hair? the cashier asked. Well, both of them had long hair. The one with dark hair? Both of them had dark hair. Ginika smiled and looked at the cashier and the cashier smiled a...

We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just m...

We are living in a time of great white evil. They are dehumanizing blacks in South Africa and Rhodesia, they fermented what happened in the Congo, they won’t let American blacks vote, they won’t let t...

We call people like Kofi American-African, not African-American, which is what we call our brothers and sisters whose ancestors were slaves.

We define masculinity in very narrow way. Masculinity is hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask th...

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.

We need to get over that myth. There was nothing Judeo-Christian about American history. Nobody liked Catholics and Jews. It’s Anglo-Protestant values, not Judeo-Christian values. Even Maryland very q...

We spend too much time telling girls that they cannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or excuse men for the same reasons.

We teach females, that in relationships, ‘compromise’ is what women do. We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs, or for accomplishments — which I think can be a good thing — but...

We teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born female, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have...