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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.
Teju Cole
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Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
World
Views
Internal
Greatest
Gifts
Call
Africa
America
Jazz
Give
Europe
States
View
Giving
Novel
Collaborated
Even
Achieve
Internals
More quotes by Teju Cole
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
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
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 often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.
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
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
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
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
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
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
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.
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
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
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
Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
Teju Cole
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
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
Still, there's that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other people, the same kind of attentiveness to life that we take comfort in. Why else would anyone watch Haneke films or read Sebald? The material is grim, but it's redeemed by the quality of the attention.
Teju Cole
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
Teju Cole
