“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
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
tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
“But the past continues to gather around like floodwater. A too easy formulation, but what past do I have in mind? The… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
It takes a few years to understand what we've lived through. At the moment, we're still sort of mired in the irrelevant… — Teju Cole Copy Share Image
Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature,… — 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
To read Transtromer - the best times are at night, in silence, and alone - is to surrender to the far-fetched. It… — 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
