Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“...above all, let your focus be on remaining a full person. Take time for yourself. Nurture your own needs. Please do not think of it as 'doing it all'. Our culture celebrates the idea of women who are able to 'do it all' but does not question the premise of that praise. I have no interest in the debate about women doing it all because it is a debate that assumes that caregiving and domestic work are singularly female domains, and idea that I strongly reject. Domestic work and caregiving should be gender-neutral, and we should be asking not whether a woman can 'do it all' but how best to support parents in their dual duties at work and at home.”

“The problem with looking in the mirror is that you never know how you will feel about what you see. Sometimes, when my hormones are out of sync, I have no interest in the mirror, and if I do look I think everything is all wrong. Other times, I am quite pleased with what I see.”

“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.”

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

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

“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)”

“Talk to her about sex, and start early. It will probably be a bit awkward, but it is necessary.”

“I was tired of everyone saying that when you write about race in America, it has to be nuanced, it has to be subtle, it has to be this and that.”

“I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'”

“If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise”

“Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.”

“Creative writing programmes are not very necessary. They just exist so that people like us can make a living.”

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

“The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle?”

“I often think that people who write a lot about poverty need to go and spend more time with poor people.”

“There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don't feel when I'm in Europe.”

“Each of my novels has come from a different place, and the processes are not always entirely conscious. I have lived off and on in America for a number of years and so have accumulated observations, found things interesting, been moved to tell stories about them.”

“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.”

“We're all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.”

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