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tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. And my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it, by writing allusively.

Teju Cole

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Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
Moments
Deal
Disaster
Around
Deals
Historical
Great
Views
Aspect
Writing
Particular
Havens
Something
Focus
Tried
Seen
Haven
Moment
Failure
Write
View
Mourning

More quotes by Teju Cole

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
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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.
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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.
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Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
Teju Cole
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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.
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I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.
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The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
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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.
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A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
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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
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One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
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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
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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
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Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.
Teju Cole
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Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
Teju Cole