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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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Teju Cole
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: June 27
Art Historian
Photographer
Writer
Michigan
United States
Many
Mode
Must
Novelists
Trying
Prefer
Way
Witness
Depict
Bear
Horrifying
Bears
Indirect
Ways
Novelist
Reality
Successfully
More quotes by 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 White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Teju Cole
It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.
Teju Cole
You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.
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
A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
Teju Cole
It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
Teju Cole
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
Teju Cole
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
Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
Teju Cole
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
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
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
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 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
I schooled in the Boston area.
Teju Cole
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.
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
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
I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.
Teju Cole
