If you’re looking for the best Americanah quotes you’ve come to the right place. We compiled a list of 41 quotes that best summarise the message of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Americanah. Let these quotes inspire you!
Americanah Quotes
It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Sometimes she worried that she was too happy. . . And her joy would become a restless thing, flapping its wings inside her, as though looking for an opening to fly away.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
…she thought of him as a person who did not have a normal spine, but had instead, a firm reed of goodness.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
It doesn’t have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There’s a lot you can do with natural hair
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone. Racists belong to the past. Racists are the thin-lipped mean white people in the movies about the civil rights era. Here’s the thing: the manifestation of racism has changed but the language has not. So if you haven’t lynched somebody then you can’t be called a racist. Somebody has to be able to say that racists are not monsters. They are people with loving families, regular folk who pay taxes. Somebody needs to get the job of deciding who is racist and who isn’t. Or maybe it’s time to just scrap the word ‘racist.’ Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’”Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
In America, racism exists but racists are all gone.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Oh, why did he slap her when she’s a widow, and that annoyed her even more. She said she should not have been slapped because she is a full human being, not because she doesn’t have a husband to speak for her.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
They tell us race is an invention, that there is no genetic variation between two black people than there is between a black person and a white person. Then they tell us black people have a worse kind of breast cancer and get more fibroid. And white folk get cystic fibrosis and osteoporosis. So what’s the deal, is race an invention or not?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Soon, ” he said in his letter. They said “soon” to each other often, and “soon” gave their plan the weight of something real.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Ifemelu thought about the expression “sweet girl.” Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
His optimism blinded her. He was full of plans. “I have an idea!” he said often. She imagined him as a child surrounded by too many brightly colored toys, always being encouraged to carry out “projects”, always being told that his mundane ideas were wonderful.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
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.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Try more strategy and less force. Passion never wins any game, never mind what they say.” He said something similar now: “Excuses don’t win a game. You should try strategy.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Maybe it’s time to just scrap the word “racist.” Find something new. Like Racial Disorder Syndrome. And we could have different categories for sufferers of this syndrome: mild, medium, and acute.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
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?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Alexa, and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.””Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
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, Americanah
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
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
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, Americanah
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, Americanah
he lived in London indeed but invisibly, his existence like an erased pencil sketch
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
One day, I will look up and all the people I know will be dead or abroad.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
I don’t want to be a sweetheart. I want to be the fucking love of your life, ” Curt said with a force that startled her.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You’re caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn’t go running with Curt today because you don’t want to sweat out this straightness. You’re always battling to make your hair do what it wasn’t meant to do.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
The point of diversity workshops, or multicultural talks, was not to inspire any real change but to leave people feeling good about themselves. They did not want the content of her ideas; they merely wanted the gesture of her presence. They had not read her blog but they had heard that she was a “leading blogger” about race.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
She did not tell him this, because 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, Americanah
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, Americanah
A book did not qualify as literature unless it had polysyllabic words and incomprehensible passages.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
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, Americanah
There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
When you want to join a prestigious social club, do you wonder if your race will make it difficult to join? If you do well in a situation, do you expect to be called a credit to your race? Or to be described as different from the majority of your race? If you need legal or medical help, do you worry that your race might work against you? If you take a job with an affirmative action employer, do you worry that your co-workers will think that you are unqualified and were hired only because of your race? Do you worry that your children will not have books and school materials that are about people of their own race?
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
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, Americanah
…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, Americanah
smiling a smile full of things restrained
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish