174 Quotes by Teju Cole

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.

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

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.

American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.

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

Mohamed Choukri – For Bread Alone – translated by Paul Bowles.

There’s always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation. It’s an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.

The shape the words end up taking are themselves the meaning of the words, they are retrospectively what we meant to say. There’s no way of knowing this until you register it in visible form. But the other side of this is that you do have some idea of where you are going.

Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities... I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him.