"When I had severe cramps as a teenager, she would say, “Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,” and it was years before I knew that girls took Buscopan for period pain."

"Love was about this, the nuggets of knowledge about our beloved that we so fluently hold."

"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."

"Some days I was fine and some days I was under water, barely breathing"

"Nature demanded so much of the woman and so little of the man"

"I just want them to know I can handle it, I can do it alone,” I said. “Some of us have men and are still doing it alone,” Mmiliaku said. She could have gloated. She could have asked, “Isn’t this the perfect man you won by deciding not to settle?” She could have been passive aggressive, or resentful, or lectured me in that world-weary way of a woman who believed that men would be men. But she didn’t, and so with the light streaming through my apartment window, I began to weep because my cousin had grace and I lacked grace."

""I think I should leave. Is that okay?” he asked as though he needed my permission to abandon me. He would kill you, but he would do it courteously."

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

"He would kill you, but he would do it slowly"

"Something was growing inside me, alien, uninvited, and it felt like an infestation."

"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."

"Nature must not want humans to reproduce, otherwise birthing would be easy, even enjoyable:"

"I felt translucent, so fragile that one more rejection would make me come fully undone."

"The frequent flare of sad longing."

"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."

"How you imagine something will be is always worse than how it actually ends up being,"

"Some kindnesses you do not ever forget. You carry them to your grave, held warmly somewhere, brought up and savored from time to time."

"You can’t nice your way to being loved."

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

"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."

"Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman..."

"It was something like pain and different from pain."

"The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot, too."

"We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very much."

"I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else."

"You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don’t wear makeup, you don’t shave, you’re always angry, you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t use deodorant."

"And even though I helped to clean the wounded, I had never taken anyone into my room.But I took this girl into my room.Her name was chinasa."

"trans women are trans women"

"Please love by giving and by taking. Give and be given. If you are only giving and not taking, you’ll know. You’ll know from that small and true voice inside you that we females are so often socialized to silence. Don’t silence that voice. Dare to take."

"Of course I am not worried about intimating men. The type of man who will be intimidated is exactly the type of man I have no interest in."

"Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage."

"Marriage can be a good thing, a source of joy, love, and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, but we don’t teach boys to do the same?"

"There are many different ways to be poor in the world but increasingly there seems to be one single way to be rich."

"How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation. Which of your favourite quotes by Chimamanda did we miss?"

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

"Many stories matter. Stories that have been used to dispossess and to malign.But stories can also be used to empower,and to humanize.Stories can break the dignity of a people.But stories can also repair that broken dignity"

"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."

"So true--when people see an absence of women in engineering, science and technology, then it becomes self-reinforcing."

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

"“The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn’t have the weight of gender expectations.”"

"“Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in.”"

""Marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”"

""My own definition is a feminist is a man or woman who says 'yes,there's a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it,we must do better.All of us,women and men,must do better." chimamanda quote based on gender."

"A successful story for me exist in a moral universe, not one where goodness always triumph, because that would be false but one with an inherent awareness of goodness"

"I look to stories for consolation,the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up everyday;as template for life;for news on how others live;for reminders that life's mysteries have no key"

"Greatness depends on where you are coming from."

"A gorgeous pitless account of love, violence and betrayal."

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