Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
The big idea behind it was to somehow participate in the discussion about justice. What does it mean to be just to the others out there whose lives we do not think about. One of the answers I came up with was simply tell their stories.
Teju Cole
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
Think
Idea
Whose
Thinking
Lives
Behinds
Tell
Behind
Others
Answers
Stories
Simply
Doe
Justice
Participate
Ideas
Came
Discussion
Mean
Bigs
Somehow
More quotes by Teju Cole
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
Teju Cole
Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce are three of my biggest influences, all of them for their formal freedom and their ability to create mood. So those comparisons are immensely flattering and, of course, unearned.
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
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
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
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
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
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
Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
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
Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
Teju Cole
Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
Teju Cole
Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.
Teju Cole
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
I just realized that we're facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at.
Teju Cole
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
A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
Teju Cole
Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how the mood gets in. It's good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It's a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.
Teju Cole
I schooled in the Boston area.
Teju Cole