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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
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Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
Important
Week
Shower
Reading
Showers
Interesting
Note
Given
Notes
Anything
Thoughts
Able
Taking
Might
Worth
Come
Single
Cumulatively
More quotes by Teju Cole
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
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
The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
Teju Cole
Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.
Teju Cole
The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses.
Teju Cole
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
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
The novelist can't successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this the mode I prefer is indirect.
Teju Cole
My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader.
Teju Cole
I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
Teju Cole
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
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
Teju Cole
I schooled in the Boston area.
Teju Cole
A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
Teju Cole
The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel.
Teju Cole
The content of Saul Leiter's photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don't so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water.
Teju Cole
Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
Teju Cole
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
Teju Cole
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
Teju Cole