“I have not read most of the big 19th — century novels that people consider “essential,” nor most of the 20th-century ones… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
In a Transtromer poem, you inhabit space differently; a body becomes a thing, a mind floats, things have lives, and even non-things,… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that's how it is in life, that's how… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“One goes to the market to participate in the world. As with all things that concern the world, being in the market… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities.… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“The degree to which my family members wish me to be separate from the life of the city is matched only by… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?” — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“Prayer was no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“There are many lives and many years, and relatively few moments when those individual histories touch each other with real recognition.” — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“The air in the strange, familiar environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real,… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Still, there's that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other people, the same kind of attentiveness to life… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
I'm not hopeful about America, and I'm not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three. — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
