174 Quotes by Teju Cole

Not all coincidence has to be loaded with meaning. Sometimes, things simply recur because that’s how it is in life, that’s how the mood gets in. It’s good to subtly overdo it too, as Nabokov does, as Sebald does. It’s a good way to intensify that region of localized weather that we call a novel.

I couldn’t remember what life was like before I started walking.

The novelist can’t successfully depict such horrifying reality. But she can, and must, try, to bear witness. There are many ways of doing this; the mode I prefer is indirect.

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.

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.

There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge.

There is a long marriage between comedy and human suffering, and mental illness, in particular, is easily played for laughs. But I had dozens of cases that would have been ill-suited for the purpose, and sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.

And it is these heavily armed and poorly paid men who are entrusted with the work of protecting the citizenry.

Love perhaps includes the promise that when the mob comes for you I’ll go against the mob.