Teju Cole Quotes

38 quotes in 684 categories

• I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.
• Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.
• 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…
• I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from…
• 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:…
• 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…
• It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
• I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
• 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.
• The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
• It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
• We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if…
• I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by…
• Life's too short for anxious score-keeping
• I schooled in the Boston area.
• A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
• The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.
• There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner...
• Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I'll go against the mob.
• One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

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