Quotes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I find that women... deal with immigration differently. And I'm interested in that.

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.

I like the U.S. and feel gratitude towards it.

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

Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

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.

While writing 'Half of a Yellow Sun,' I enjoyed playing with minor things: inventing a train station in a town that has none, placing towns closer to each other than they are, changing the chronology of conquered cities. Yet I did not play with the central events of that time.

To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.

I own things I like, but nothing inanimate that I treasure in a deeply consuming way.

I would come, many years later, to understand why 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is considered 'an important novel', but when I first read it at 11, I was simply absorbed by the way it evoked the mysteries of childhood, of treasures discovered in trees, and games played with an exotic summer friend.

I think the Left doesn't know how to be a tribe in the way the Right does. The Left is very cannibalistic. It eats its own.

I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femaleness and my femininity. And I want to be respected in all of my femaleness because I deserve to be.

...he did not want me to seek the whys, because there are some things that happen for which we can formulate no whys, for which whys simply do not exist and, perhaps, are not necessary.

I think it's possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.

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.

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 been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?' Aunty Ifeka said. 'Your life belongs to you and you alone.

Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

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.

Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.

There can be an extremist idea of purity. It's so easy to fall afoul of the ridiculously high standard set there.

At some point I was a HappyAfricanFeminist who does not hate men. And who likes lip gloss and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.

For me, feminism is a movement for which the end goal is to make itself no longer needed.