Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Quotes

Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.

It ain't easy to break out of a mold, but if you do your work, people will ultimately see what you're capable of. Too often, people find it easier to make assumptions and stick with what they believe. They put you in a place and it makes their job easier. The good people constantly search for something different.

The society wants you to have beautiful personalities; the society wants you to have personalities which are comfortable for the society, convenient for the society. But the person is not the real thing, the individual is the real thing. The individual is not necessarily always comfortable to the society - in fact he is very inconvenient.

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you.

You cannot live your life looking at yourself from someone else's point of view.

I refused to conform to an image that a lot of people thought a president's brother should adopt.

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.

We all have experiences in our lives that change us, and we all learn from people, like my dad, but at the end of the day, it's only us. And we're only responsible to make ourselves happy.

You're not allowed to be an eccentric in the world, you have to fit it.

He who goes against the fashion is himself its slave.

You don't want to spend your life explaining yourself.

Every single person, pretty much, is taught what they're supposed to do: go to school, get a job, find someone to love, get married, have kids, raise the kids, and then die. Nobody questions that. What if you want to do something different?

As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.

At the end of the day, I'm a human being and I just think that's what it is. Challenging stereotypes by just being who I am.

I think most of us are outsiders. And I think that's good because it makes you question things.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

A good way I know to find happiness, is to not bore a hole to fit the plug.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?'

Everyone says 'Anna Karenina' is about individual desire going against society, but I actually think the opposite is stronger: the way societal forces limit the expression of the individual.

For one thing I tend not to see myself in various moulds that people fit me into.

You can't base your life on other people's expectations.

One resists categorization at one's peril.

I'm tired of living the vanilla, non-offensive life. I think that's a really sad way to spend my life, and I lived it like that because that's what I was brought up in, taught to not rock the ship.