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So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.
Teju Cole
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Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
Book
Fine
Julius
Cities
Embraces
Open
Discuss
Politics
Detail
Use
Contemporary
Doesn
Details
Others
Embrace
Evades
Certain
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Markers
More quotes by 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
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
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
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
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 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
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
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
The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.
Teju Cole
I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
Teju Cole
It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant bullshit. There isn't yet that public conversation about 9/11.
Teju Cole
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
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
Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
Teju Cole
I schooled in the Boston area.
Teju Cole
The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
Teju Cole
Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
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
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
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