174 Quotes by Teju Cole

We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world.

We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd. 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 my audience, and gave voice to another’s words.

I just realized that we’re facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at.

It wasn’t a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.

It will finally be broadcast on the national news, to outrage, and to an instant forgetting.

Echo is very important to me. I love the repetition of motifs, or the slight alteration of what’s been said before. This is part of how one creates a mood, a psychological caul, in fact, around the reader.

I feel like a tuning fork, vibrating with an unfamiliar will to violence.

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.

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.