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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9379bcc | They have the kinds of things we can eat.' An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she were not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the othe.. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| e567ed0 | Existem pessoas (...) que acham que nos nao conseguimos governar nosso proprio pais, pois nas poucas vezes em que tentamos nos falhamos, como se todos os outros que se governam hoje em dia tivessem acertado de primeira. E como dizer a um bebe que esta engatinhando, tenta andar e cai de bunda no chao que ele deve permanecer no chao. Como se todos os adultos que passam por ele tambem nao houvessem engatinhado um dia. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| e9209c1 | O jokal Eugene tem de parar de fazer o trabalho de Deus. Deus e grande o suficiente para fazer seu proprio trabalho. Se Deus for julgar nosso pai por escolher o caminho de nossos ancestrais, entao Ele que faca o julgamento, nao Eugene. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 6033557 | Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care...What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say "Don't call me black, I'm from Trinidad"? I don't think so. So you're black, baby." | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 1ed24ba | Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 09a4785 | On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating "paparazzi" over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor quietly asked, "But who exactly are the paparazzi? Are they motorcyclists?" and instantly earned himself the nickname Okoli Paparazzi" | diana paparazzi media name | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | |
| 9ee6079 | There was something unquestioning about her roommates' lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, "Let's go get some," about whatever it was they needed--more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor--as though this getting was not an act that required money." | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 6ccfce1 | They believed. They truly believed. It often came to her as a sweet shock, the knowledge that there were so many people in the world who felt exactly as she and Blaine did about Barack Obama. On | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 01eed74 | before he fell asleep, Moliere's words came to him, strangely comforting: Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 02508ee | They mimicked what Americans told them: You speak such good English. How bad is AIDS in your country? It's so sad that people live on less than a dollar a day in Africa. And they themselves mocked Africa, trading stories of absurdity, of stupidity, and they felt safe to mock, because it was mockery born of longing, and of the heartbroken desire to see a place made whole again. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| adf04b1 | And even though she checked "yes" to all the symptoms on the card the doctor gave her, she refused to accept the diagnosis of panic attacks because panic attacks happened only to Americans. Nobody in Kinshasa had panic attacks. It was not even that it was called by another name, it was simply not called at all. Did things begin to exist only when they were named?" | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 2858851 | She sits at the edge of the leather sofa and looks around the living room, remembers the delivery man from Ethan Interiors who changed the lampshade the other day. "You got a great house, ma'am," he'd said, with that curious American smile that meant he believed he, too, could have something like it someday. It is one of the things she has come to love about America, the abundance of unreasonable hope." | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 683f4fc | You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be, Richard," she said quietly." | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| eed5753 | There are simply no doctors and nurses left on that continent. It's an absolute tragedy! African doctors should stay in Africa." "Why shouldn't they want to practice where there is regular electricity and regular pay?" Mark asked, his tone flat. Obinze sensed that he did not like Alexa at all. "I'm from Grimsby and I certainly don't want to work in a district hospital there." "But it isn't quite the same thing, is it? We're speaking of some.. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 3efedfd | Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify" in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people's stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself." | commenters | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | |
| 63fb5a6 | She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 5551c73 | Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 2dd410e | She didn't want to speak up because she didn't want to seem aggressive. She let her resentments simmer. What struck me--with her and with many other female American friends I have--is how invested they are in being "liked." How they have been raised to believe that their being likable is very important and that this "likable" trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being aggressive or disagreeing.. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| d0fe9aa | And it struck Obinze that, a few years ago, they were attending weddings, now it was christenings and soon it would be funerals. They would die. They would all die after trudging through lives in which they were neither happy nor unhappy. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| c609c40 | She had a formidable air; a person who went about setting everyone and everything right in the world. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 9b7d694 | Eu tinha lido que o Brasil e a meca das racas, mas, quando fui ao Rio, ninguem que estava nos restaurantes e hoteis caros se parecia comigo. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| aaf142f | She was taking two sides at once, to please everyone; she always chose peace over truth, was always eager to conform. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| c67a418 | He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 76daf3e | When I started in real estate, I considered renovating old houses instead of tearing them down, but it didn't make sense. Nigerians don't buy houses because they're old. A renovated two-hundred-year-old mill granary, you know, the kind of thing Europeans like. It doesn't work here at all. But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahe.. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 3b921b9 | 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 | ||
| 8d721b0 | she was uncomfortable with what the professors called "participation," and did not see why it should be part of the final grade; it merely made students talk and talk, class time wasted on obvious words, hollow words, sometimes meaningless words. It had to be that Americans were taught, from elementary school, to always say something in class, no matter what. They never said, "I don't know." They said, instead, "I'm not sure," which did not.. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 15a95b9 | He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 5ca9a48 | It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father's "Hello?" after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: "Ifem, how is the weather in America?" | parents parents-and-children | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | |
| 1186a2e | They are always so quiet," he said, turning to Papa. "So quiet." "They are not like those loud children people are raising these days, with no home training and no fear of God," Papa said, and I was certain that it was pride that stretched Papa's lips and lightened his eyes. "Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet." It was a joke. Ade Coker was laughing; so was his wife, Yewanda. But Papa did not laugh. Jaja and I turned an.. | fathers suppression | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | |
| 0288526 | Please do not go to Kmart and buy twenty pairs of jeans because each costs five dollars. The jeans are not running away. They will be there tomorrow at an even more reduced price. You are now in America: do not expect to have hot food for lunch. That African taste must be abolished. When you visit the home of an American with some money, they will offer to show you their house. Forget that in your house back home, your father would throw a .. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 5eb09ee | I didn't know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 5775331 | When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told Aunty Uju that she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 23fb443 | Some people ask: "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest." -- | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 9c8952b | You read American fiction to learn about dysfunctional white folk doing things that are weird to normal white folks. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 30c0048 | We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a 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 their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak, a hard man. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 4d175ec | Are you the first person to have this problem? You have to get up and hustle. Everybody is hustling, Lagos is about hustling," Nneoma said." | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 34416ca | Still, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I'm expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we don't teach boys to do the same? I | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 1c4c038 | Papa said that the parish priest in Abba was not spiritual enough. That was the problem with our people, Papa told us, our priorities were wrong; we cared too much about huge church buildings and mighty statues. You would never see white people doing that. | judgment | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | |
| b83f63e | It is easy to say, 'But women can just say no to all this.' But the reality is more difficult, more complex. We are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization. Even | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 187c4b4 | We raise girls to see each other as competitors - not for jobs or accomplishments, which in my opinion can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don't mind knowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters' boyfriends? God forbid. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 94802ee | And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretence into an art form. I | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| e8c04e5 | Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. We have been so conditioned to think of power as male that a powerful woman is an aberration. And so she is policed. We ask of powerful women: Is she humble? Does she smile? Is she grateful enough? Does she have a domestic side? Questions we do not ask of powerful men, which shows that our discomfort is not with power itself, but with women. We judge powerful women more hars.. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 86e8356 | Everything is about them now." "One day they will be grown and leave home and you will just be a source of embarrassment or exasperation for them and they won't take your phone calls or won't call you for weeks," | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ||
| 2742076 | Our world is full of men and women who do not like powerful women. | feminist | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |