Teju Cole Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• I'm not hopeful about America, and I'm not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who are lucky, there's a great deal to enjoy in it. But will things get better for most people? I don't know. I don't see the evidence.

  Teju Cole

  America, People, Hopeful

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Cities, Feelings

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  12 Copy quote

• Our biggest art forms are film and television, and there hasn't been a great film about 9/11 yet, nor has there been a great television series. Something like The Wire gives us a rich and fully achieved picture of the wasteful, cruel War on Drugs; something like The White Ribbon gives a perspective on World War I that could only have been presented long after the event itself.

  Teju Cole

  Art, War, White

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  4 Copy quote

• Killing a bunch of people in Sudan and Yemen and Pakistan, it's like, "Who cares - we don't know them." But the current discussion is framed as "When can the President kill an American citizen?" Now in my mind, killing a non-American citizen without due process is just as criminal as killing an American citizen without due process - but whatever gets us to the table to discuss this thing, we're going to take it.

  Teju Cole

  People, Mind, President

  "Teju Cole on the 'Empathy Gap' and Tweeting Drone Strikes". Interview with Sarah Zhang, www.motherjones.com. March 6, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• 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 it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects - maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books - and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don't think it's as simple as literary inclusiveness.

  Teju Cole

  Art, Book, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There's an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there's enough of the present included to lull the reader.

  Teju Cole

  Past, Hands, Flavor

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.

  Teju Cole

  Book, Smartphones, Cities

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.

  Teju Cole

  Writing, Potatoes, Environment

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Bullshit, Moments

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• There's a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. Into the space created by that reticence, you bring in those things that best help us confront ambiguity: music, painting, film, and so on.

  Teju Cole

  Suffering Of Others, Space, Helping

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I often say I've spent more time with photography than I have with literature just in terms of hours.

  Teju Cole

  Photography, Literature, Hours

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

• Still, there's that faint glimmer of hope we feel when we sense, in other people, the same kind of attentiveness to life that we take comfort in. Why else would anyone watch Haneke films or read Sebald? The material is grim, but it's redeemed by the quality of the attention.

  Teju Cole

  People, Quality, Comfort

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

  4 Copy quote

• I schooled in the Boston area.

  Teju Cole

  Boston, Schooled, Areas

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.59, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

• The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.

  Teju Cole

  Evil, World, Enthusiasm

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.240, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

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

  Teju Cole

  Writing, Marketing, Novelists

  "My hero: Michael Ondaatje by Teju Cole" by Teju Cole, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.

  Teju Cole

  Mean, Self, Stories

  Teju Cole (2011). “Open City”, p.243, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Glasses, Water, Firsts

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.104, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

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

  Teju Cole

  Attention, Pun, Draws

  Teju Cole (2016). “Known and Strange Things”, p.59, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

Page 3 of 3

First

← Prev

1

2

3

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin