Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Our histories cling to us. We are shaped by where we come from.”

“As we drove back to Enugu, I laughed loudly,above Fela's stringent singing. I laughed because Nsukka's untarred roads coat cars with dust in the harmattan and with sticky mud in the rainy season. Because the tarred roads spring potholes like surprise presents and the air smells of hills and history and the sunlight scatters the sand and turns it into gold dust. Because Nsukka could free something deep inside your belly that would rise up to your throat and come out as freedom song. As laughter.(299)”

“I sat at my bedroom window after I changed; the cashew tree was so close I could reach out and pluck a leaf if it were not for the silver-colour crisscross of mosquito netting. The bell-shaped yellow fruits hung lazily, drawing buzzing bees that bumped against my window's netting. I heard Papa walk upstairs to his room for his afternoon siesta. I closed my eyes, sat still, waiting to hear him call Jaja, to hear Jaja go into his room. But after long, silent minutes, I opened my eyes and pressed my forehead against the window louvers to look outside.9”

“Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.(Opening page, 3)”

“Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.”

“They will always be doomed to supermarkets like this.”

“Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”

“Papa sat down at the table and poured his tea from the china tea set with pink flowers on the edges. I waited for him to ask Jaja and me to take a sip, as he always did. A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you love.”

“Show a people as one thing, only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.”

“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 is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”

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

“We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.”

“And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it.”

“People have crushes on priests all the time, you know. It’s exciting to have to deal with God as a rival.”

“لقد شعرت دائماً أنه من المستحيل التعامل بشكل صحيح مع مكان أو شخص بدون إستصحاب كل القصص عن ذلك المكان وذلك الشخص. تبعات النظرة الآحادية هي هذه: أنها تجرّد الناس من الكرامة. إنها تجعل إعترافنا بتساوي إنسانيتنا صعب. وهي تؤكد كم أننا مختلفون بدلاً عن كم نحن متشابهون.”

“He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. 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.”

“...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.”

“Eugene has to stop doing God's job. God is big enough to do his own job. If God will judge our father for choosing to follow the way of our ancestors, then let God do the judging, not Eugene.”

“Oh, my God,’ she said, between sobs. ‘Oh, my God.’Olanna reached out often to squeeze her arm. The rawness of Edna’s grief made her helpless, brought the urge to stretch her hand into the past and reverse history. Finally, Edna fell asleep. Olanna gently placed a pillow beneath her head and sat thinking about how a single act could reverberate over time and space and leave stains that could never be washed off. She thought about how ephemeral life was, about not choosing misery. She would move back to Odenigbo’s house.”

“Nnamabia seemed fine to me, slipping his money into his anus and all.”

“She could not complain about not having shoes when the person she was talking to had no legs.”

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

“I recently spoke at a university where a student told me it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had recently read a novel called American Psycho,and that it was a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.”

“Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.”

“Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.”

“Her bladder felt painfully, solidly full, as though it would burst and release not urine but the garbled prayers she was muttering.”

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

“I was stained by failure.”

“Military men would always overthrow one another, because they could, because they were all power drunk.”

“We did that often, asking each other questions whose answers we already knew. Perhaps it was so that we would not ask the other questions, the ones whose answers we did not want to know.”

“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.”

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know. ”

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”

“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”

“Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.”

“If this is hatred, then it is very young. I has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.”

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”

“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.”

“...my point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.”

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