Teju Cole famous quotes

I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
-- Teju Cole

#Eye #Way #Hippo

Note-taking is important to me: a week's worth of reading notes (or "thoughts I had in the shower" notes) is cumulatively more interesting than anything I might be able to come up with on a single given day.
-- Teju Cole

#Reading #Interesting #Important

Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
-- Teju Cole

#Promise

I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.
-- Teju Cole

#Photography #Literature #Hours

We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.
-- Teju Cole

#Fall #Past #Space

If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour waiting for it to resolve, waiting for the geometry of a theme to be exactly what you want them to be. That was my process to get photos.
-- Teju Cole

#Waiting #Want #Might

Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
-- Teju Cole

#Light #Air #Psychics

I'm not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field.
-- Teju Cole

#Trying #Fields #Faces

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
-- Teju Cole

#Reflection #Sorrow #Splits

Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.
-- Teju Cole

#Strong #Who I Am #Identity

I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.
-- Teju Cole

#Writing #Divorce #Plies

The creative part of oneself finds its way out. In this case, I got interested particularly in the medium of Twitter and looked for ways to use it creatively.
-- Teju Cole

#Creative #Use #Way

But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
-- Teju Cole

#Book #Voice #Sound

What's interesting about Twitter is the unmediatedness of it, the directness of it. I'm on a train somewhere in New York and I send out a tweet. Somebody sitting at dinner in Bombay checks their phone and they see it.
-- Teju Cole

#New York #Phones #Interesting

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
-- Teju Cole

#Photography #Difficulty #Explicit

Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.
-- Teju Cole

#Sky #Sight #Perspective

There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bushs presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted from the gut, and was economical with the truth until it disappeared.
-- Teju Cole

#War #Years #Feelings

Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
-- Teju Cole

#Attention #Pun #Draws

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
-- Teju Cole

#Writing #Marketing #Purpose

The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops
-- Teju Cole

#Creative #Energy #Bus

Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole takes it a step further and slams what he calls the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” which cares little for the end, so long as it gets satisfaction from the means. “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” says Cole. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
-- Teju Cole

#Morning #Mean #Emotional

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
-- Teju Cole

#Hero #Mean #Self

I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.
-- Teju Cole

#Remember #Walking

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.
-- Teju Cole

#Mean #Self #Stories

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.
-- Teju Cole

#Moving #Fall #Rain

It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
-- Teju Cole

#World #Dangerous

I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
-- Teju Cole

#Real #Monsters #Adore

The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
-- Teju Cole

#Cities #Palimpsest #Site

It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
-- Teju Cole

#Deception #Lovers

Life's too short for anxious score-keeping
-- Teju Cole

#Too Short #Score #Anxious

I schooled in the Boston area.
-- Teju Cole

#Boston

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner...
-- Teju Cole

#Expectations #Sin #Sinner

Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.
-- Teju Cole

#Writing #Three

The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
-- Teju Cole

#Evil #World #Enthusiasm

A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
-- Teju Cole

#Said #Mindless