"That night when I bathed, with a bucket half full of rainwater, I did not scrub my left hand, the hand that Father Amadi had held gently to slide the flower off my finger. I did not heat the water, either, because I was afraid that the heating coil would make the rainwater lose the scent of the sky. I sang as I bathed. There were more earthworms in the bathtub, and I left them alone, watching the water carry them and send them down the drain."

"(Page 269-270)"

"Kambili is right,’ she said. ‘Something from God was happening there.’"

"(Page 275)"

"Of course God does. Look at what He did to his faithful servant Job, even to His own Son. But have you ever wondered why? Why did He have to murder his own son so we would be saved? Why didn’t he just go ahead and save us?'"

"(Page 289)"

"We will take Jaja to Nsukka first, and then we’ll go to America to visit Aunty Ifeoma,’ I said. ‘We’ll plant new orange trees in Abba when we come back, and Jaja will plant purple hibiscus, too, and I’ll plant ixora so we can suck the juices of the flowers.’ I am laughing. I reach out and place my arm around Mama’s shoulder and she leans toward me and smiles."

"(Page 306-307)"

"Things started to fall apart at home.”"

"A love sip, he called it, because you shared the little things you loved with the people you loved […] The tea was always too hot, always burned my tongue.”"

"Jaja’s defiance seems like Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.”"

"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."

"This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles"

"Is love this misguided need to have you beside me most of the time? Is love this safety I feel in our silences? Is it this belonging, this completeness?"

"...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."

"The truth has become an insult."

"This is our world, although the people who drew this map decided to put their own land on top of ours. There is no top or bottom, you see."

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

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

"Greatness depends on where you are coming from."

"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"

"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"

""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."

""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.”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

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

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

"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."

"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"

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

"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?"

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

"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?"

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

"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."

"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."

"trans women are trans women"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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