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Quotes from Zikora — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

born 1977 Nigeria

← All quotes by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

43 quotes

And I never told the boy who didn’t love me, the boy I was trying to make love me when I didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved.

Zikora (2020)

He rolled his eyes in a kind of disbelieving amusement. “What, the single friend will seduce the husband, or the single friend will make the wife want to be single again?

Zikora (2020)

I felt ragged and hopeless, high on my desperation. I had already ripped up my dignity, so I might as well scatter the pieces.

Zikora (2020)

They learned instead from mainstream pornography, where women were always shaved smooth and never had periods, and so they became men who thought the contrived histrionics onscreen were How Things Were Done.

Zikora (2020)

My father told jokes and laughed and charmed everyone, and broke things and walked on the shards without knowing he had broken things.

Zikora (2020)

He grew up with his dreams already dreamt for him

Zikora (2020)

He would kill you, but he would do it slowly

Zikora (2020)

What did “It’s time to get married” mean, anyway? Why did she have to marry at all?

Zikora (2020)

A fog blanketed me, a kind of deadness. I didn’t cry; crying seemed too ordinary for this moment.

Zikora (2020)

You can’t nice your way to being loved.

Zikora (2020)

Her silence bruised the air between us.

Zikora (2020)

The frequent flare of sad longing.

Zikora (2020)

What was “normal”? That Nature traded in unnecessary pain? It wasn’t his intestines being set on fire, after all.

Zikora (2020)

It felt like the Old Testament. A plague. A primitive wind blowing at will, evil but purposelessly so, an overcoming in my body that didn’t need to be.

Zikora (2020)

sifted through my memories, as though through debris, trying to find a reason.

Zikora (2020)

The labor and delivery ward needed to have a false eye-lash policy

Zikora (2020)

I read somewhere that love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold

Zikora (2020)

Zikky, it won’t be easy, but it won’t be as hard as you think. How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being

Zikora (2020)

I looked at my mother, standing by the window. How had I never really seen her? It was my father who destroyed, and it was my mother I blamed for the ruins left behind.

Zikora (2020)

If he was going to have a child, of course he should have a say, but how much of a say, since the body was mine, since in creating a child, Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man.

Zikora (2020)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.