Top Teju Cole Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Teju Cole Biography

Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is an American writer, photographer, and art historian.

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Teju Cole Quotes

Yes, there's a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe's greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We'll call it even.

America, Europe, Greatest, Internal, Views

I schooled in the Boston area.

Area, Areas, Boston, Schooled

The energies of Lagos life- creative, malevolent, ambiguous- converge at the bus stops

Bus Stops, Creative, Energies, Energy, Stops

The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.

Big, Emotional, Industrial, Justice, White

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 aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.

Audience, Book, Gave, Sound, Voice

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 be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

Alive, Dead, Reflection, Seemed, Sorrow, Stood

You don't bring in a gay character as a way of commenting on gay issues. You have one there because he's real, and that's his life, no less so than your life is yours.

Character, Gay, Real

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.

Art, Biggest, Event, Perspective, War, White

You know that this vignette and that vignette belong side by side, you know that a certain turn of phrase you've been saving will probably work best within a given section of the narrative. As in a jazz performance, writing lives or dies by what's produced in that moment. But that moment is attended by long preparation.

Long, Performance, Preparation, Probably, Section, Writing

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.

Art, Book, Contains, Maps, Mean, Think

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.

Book, Cities, City, Contemporary, Evades, Smartphones

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.

Comfort, Haneke, Material, People, Quality

A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.

Mindless, Mob, Said

Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.

Choose, Forget, Going Away, Things, You Choose

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: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.

Cities, Hotels, Lights, New York, Psychics, Substance

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel.

Art, Australia, Australian, Beckett, Genius, Reality

tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. This is something I haven't seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. And my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it, by writing allusively.

Disaster, Focus, Moment, Views, Write, Writing

There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner.

Expectations, Sin, Sinner, Identified, Talk, Expectation

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

Beautiful, Chasing, Language, Moving, Reader, Writing

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.

Apt, Attempt, Marketing, Novelists, Purposes, Writing

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