Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has long been a literary force, well known for her stories that are both deeply personal and universally resonant. Dream Count, her latest work, is no exception. In it, she explores themes of identity, migration, and love with her signature eloquence. Whether you’re a long-time admirer or a new reader, these 31 quotes capture the brilliance, wit, and acute honesty that define Adichie’s writing in Dream Count:
- I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being. Until a crack appears in the sky and widens and reveals us to ourselves, as the pandemic did, because it was during lockdown that I began to sift through my life, and to give names to things long unnamed.
- It was as if we could no longer be ourselves because the world was not itself.
- Afam was indoors now, and he looked so fragile on the screen that I thought how breakable we all are, and how easily we forget how breakable we are.
- “I thought: I’m growing old. I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known.
- I grieved what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by, who might not just have loved me but truly known me.
- Love can be self-damage, if in fact it is love.
- Omelogor so clearly saw others and yet was blind to herself, how her certainties could intimidate, how her words scalded even if she didn’t mean them to.
- I look back now and see my weakness in such sharp relief, being pliant and docile in exchange for nothing; the clarity of hindsight is bewildering.
- We are in love and then we are not in love. Where does love go when we stop loving?
- The problem is that many of these White people don’t think we also dream.
- “Perhaps I fell in love that day; love happens long before we call it love.
- Childbirth transcended imagination; if she were not now trapped in this, she could never have imagined the vulgar helplessness of birthing a child.
- I did want a husband and child, but not under any circumstances. I didn’t want to be single, but being single was not intolerable.
- How slippery moralities are, how they circle and thin and change with circumstance.
- Does it help to know that the world is full of people who are sadder than you?
- A person’s surface was never the full story, or even the story.
- She was a thing, a thing to own and invade and discard, and this frightened her.
- Don’t pretend that you like the life you are living.
- She was a woman and she was breakable.
- I will do for you what no other man has done for you,’ he said, and his lascivious smile repulsed me.
- Two whole years had passed and I was shocked by how long his wounded ego had bled and how far the blood had spooled.
- I can tell the ending is near when I start talking to my curtains, saying words meant for the man while looking at the curtains on my windows.
- Money is an armor and it is a porous amour. It shields you, feeds you the potent drug of independence, grants you time and choices.
- Arrogance in women has the possibility of excitement, because it is subversive, but in men it is always reactionary, and therefore boring, especially arrogance of the chivalrous kind, that noblesse oblige of the stronger sex.
- If you live your life and die without one person fully knowing you then have you even lived?
- America is so provincial, like an enormous giant of a man from a bush village who blunders about with supreme certainty, not knowing he is bush because he is blinded by his strength.
- Misery always had seemed a big dramatic emotion but I knew now that it was small and slow-dripping, a shallow submerging that felt eternal.
