174 Quotes by Teju Cole

It’s a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me.

And, he added with a laugh, you don’t ever notice your oxygen until it’s gone: something goes wrong with the HVAC, even for fifteen minutes, and people are ready to riot.

The soft ululations of the water fell into my ears, and out of those murmurs, M.’s plaintive voice.

The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather.

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.

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

From where I stood, the Statue of Liberty was a flourescent green fleck against the sky, and beyond her sat Ellis Island, the focus of so many myths; but it had been built too late for those early Africans – who weren’t immigrants in any case – and it had been closed too soon to mean anything to the later Africans like Kenneth, or the cabdriver, or me.

There are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population.

Malcolm X recognized that difference contains its own value, and that the struggle must be to advance that value. Martin Luther King is admired by everyone, he wants everyone to join together, but this idea that you should let them hit you on the other side of your face, this makes no sense to me.