Quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

She did not tell him this, because 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.

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.

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.

Theres something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. Youve never even accepted that the man was ugly.

Mama had greeted him the traditional way that women were supposed to, bending low and offering him her back so that he would pat it with his fan made of the soft, straw-colored tail of an animal. Back home that night, Papa told Mama that it was sinful. You did not bow to another human being. It was an ungodly tradition, bowing to an Igwe. So, a few days later, when we went to see the bishop at Awka, I did not kneel to kiss his ring. I wanted to make Papa proud. But Papa yanked my ear in the car and said I did not have the spirit of discernment: the bishop was a man of God; the Igwe was merely a traditional ruler.

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

There is so much that is still silent between Jaja and me. Perhaps we will talk more with time, or perhaps we never will be able to say it all, to clothe things in words, things that have long been naked.

Soon, he said in his letter. They said soon to each other often, and soon gave their plan the weight of something real.

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

I dont want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life, Curt said with a force that startled her.

Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her.

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?

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 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.

If you followed the media youd think that everybody in Africa was starving to death, and thats not the case; so its important to engage with the other Africa.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

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.

I have my fathers lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddys girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasnt crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my fathers.

“The truth has become an insult.”

“We never actively remember death, Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.”