Quotes from Half of a Yellow Sun

“You must never behave as if your life belongs to a man. Do you hear me?” Aunty Ifeka said. “Your life belongs to you and you alone.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“...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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“There are some things that are so unforgivable that they make other things easily forgivable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“And it's wrong of you to think that love leaves room for nothing else. It's possible to love something and still condescend to it.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“The truth has become an insult.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“You Americans, always peering under people's beds to look for communism.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Richard exhaled. It was like somebody sprinkling pepper on his wound: Thousands of Biafrans were dead, and this man wanted to know if there was anything new about one dead white man. Richard would write about this, the rule of Western journalism: One hundred dead black people equal to one dead white person.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“He was making her feel small and absurdly petulant and, worse yet, she suspected he was right. She always suspected he was right. For a brief irrational moment, she wished she could walk away from him. 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.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Greatness depends on where you are coming from.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“There's something very lazy about the way you have loved him blindly for so long without ever criticizing him. You've never even accepted that the man is ugly,' Kainene said. There was a small smile on her face and then she was laughing, and Olanna could not help but laugh too, because it was not what she had wanted to hear and because hearing it had made her feel better.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“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?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Death would be a complete knowingness, but what frightened him was this: not knowing beforehand what it was he would know. ”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“There was something wrong with her. She did not know what it was but there was something wrong with her. A hunger, a restlessness. An incomplete knowledge of herself. The sense of something farther away, beyond her reach.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“How can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Why do I love him?...I don't think love has a reason...I think love comes first and then the reasons follow.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Each time he suggested they get married, she said no. They were too happy, precariously so, and she wanted to guard that bond; she feared that marriage would flatten it into a prosaic partnership.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“There are two answers to the things they will teach you about our land: the real answer and the answer you give in school to pass. You must read books and learn both answers.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“I knew what I wanted to run to. But it didn’t exist, so I didn’t leave.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“If the sun refuses to rise we will make it rise”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“If this is hatred, then it is very young. I has been caused, simply, by the informal divide-and-rule policies of the British colonial exercise. These policies manipulated the differences between the tribes and ensured that unity would not exist, thereby making the easy governance of such a large country practicable.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

“هل الحبّ هو هذا الاحتياج المُضلل لأن تكونَ إلى جواري معظم الوقت؟ هل الحبّ هو هذا الأمان الذي أشعرُ به أنا في صمتنا؟”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quote from Half of a Yellow Sun

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Popular quotes

“But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?”
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“Deny people something they want, over a longish period, and they naturally start disagreeing about precisely what it is they do want.”
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“And what else did Christianity accomplish?” he said. “Here’s what Christianity accomplished. Christianity accomplished the mob. The mob. It accomplished not only your senseless butchery, the extermination of all those involved in it, black and white, but the horror of lawless retaliation and reprisal—one hundred and thirty-one innocent niggers both slave and free cut down by the mob that roamed Southampton for a solid week, searching vengeance. I reckon you didn’t figure on that neither back then, did you, Reverend?”
― William Styron, quote from The Confessions of Nat Turner

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