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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

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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
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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
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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
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It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
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
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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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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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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
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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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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.
Teju Cole
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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
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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.
Teju Cole
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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
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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
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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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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
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Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.
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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The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
Teju Cole
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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