History Quotes by Teju Cole

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

— 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…

— 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…

— Teju Cole

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're…

— Teju Cole

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with…

— Teju Cole

“Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how…

— Teju Cole

“I look at his hands. In those hands is new knowledge.”

— Teju Cole

“The mind roams more widely in the dark than it does in light. It is no surprise, then, stepping out of the unlit house…

— Teju Cole

“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is…

— Teju Cole

Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three.

— Teju Cole

“The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten...Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of…

— Teju Cole

“As I contemplated the silent world before me, I thought of the many romantic ideas attached to blindness. Ideas of unusual sensitivity and genius…

— Teju Cole

Always say 'no pun intended' to draw attention to the intended pun.

— Teju Cole

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don't mean…

— Teju Cole

One of the chief characteristics of a mob is its quickness. It is sudden. It pounces.

— Teju Cole