CNChimamanda Ngozi Adichie

136 collected words

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Born 1977 AD; death year unknown

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01c. 1977 AD

Gender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable. Both men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender. Because thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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02c. 1977 AD

Other men might respond by saying: Okay, this is interesting, but I don’t think like that. I don’t even think about gender. Maybe not. And that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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03c. 1977 AD

Today, we live in a vastly different world. 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 attributes. A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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04c. 1977 AD

Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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05c. 1977 AD

The language of marriage is often a language of ownership, not a language of partnership.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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06c. 1977 AD

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we ´should' be rather than recognizing how we are.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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07c. 1977 AD

A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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08c. 1977 AD

Don’t see it as forgiving him. See it as allowing yourself to be happy. What will you do with the misery you have chosen? Will you eat misery?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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09c. 1977 AD

She cries quietly, her shoulders heaving up and down, not the kind of loud sobbing that the women Chika knows do, the kind that screams Hold me and comfort me because I cannot deal with this alone. The woman's crying is private, as though she is carrying out a necessary ritual that involves no one else.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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10c. 1977 AD

If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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11c. 1977 AD

There was something brittle about her, and he feared she would snap apart at the slightest touch; she had thrown herself so fiercely into this, the erasing of memory, that it would destroy her.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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12c. 1977 AD

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

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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13c. 1977 AD

People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought—to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than to greet—and because so many others like him exercised those rights, his choices were interpreted as humility.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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14c. 1977 AD

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.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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15c. 1977 AD

Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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16c. 1977 AD

She felt as if she had somehow failed him and herself by allowing his mother’s behavior to upset her. She should be above it; she should shrug it off as the ranting of a village woman; she should not keep thinking of all the retorts she could have made instead of just standing mutely in that kitchen. But she was upset, and made even more so by Odenigbo's expression, as if he could not believe she was not quite as high-minded as he had thought.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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17c. 1977 AD

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. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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18c. 1977 AD

Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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19c. 1977 AD

...I'm worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English. I know this woman in grad school, a friend of a friend, and just listening to her talk is scary. The semiotic dialetics of intertextual modernity. Which makes no sense at all. Sometimes I feel that they live in a parallel universe of academia speaking acadamese instead of English and they don't really know what's happening in the real world.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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20c. 1977 AD

femelu could not understand this, her mother’s ability to tell herself stories about her reality that did not even resemble her reality

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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21c. 1977 AD

She had come to understand that American parenting was a juggling of anxieties, and that it came with having too much food: a sated belly gave Americans time to worry that their child might have a rare disease that they had just read about, made them think they had the right to protect their child from disappointment and want and failure. A sated belly gave Americans the luxury of praising themselves for being good parents, as if caring for one's child was the exception rather than the rule.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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22c. 1977 AD

The longer she spent in America, the better she had become at distinguishing, sometimes from looks and gait, but mostly from bearing and demeanor, that fine-grained mark that culture stamps on people. (Chapter 17)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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23c. 1977 AD

They never said “I don’t know.” They said, instead, “I’m not sure,” which did not give any information but still suggested the possibility of knowledge.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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24c. 1977 AD

Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart? Ifemulu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike's suicide attempt since she came back.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / quote

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