Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

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

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

“We teach girls shame. Close your legs; cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female, they're already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up--and this is the worst thing we do to girls--they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”

“I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination.”

“If you followed the media you'd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and that's not the case; so it's important to engage with the other Africa.”

“If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.”

“Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person.”

“If we do something over and over again, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over again, it becomes normal.”

“There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man was ugly.”

“If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.”

“He thought about the next time he would laugh with her and then the next. He found himself often thinking about the future, even before the present was over.”