174 Quotes by Teju Cole

The walks met a need: they were a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and once I discovered them as therapy, they became the normal thing, and I forgot what life had been like before I started walking,

Part of the role of the writer, I believe, is to take dangerous positions on behalf of those whose voices are not so easily heard.

I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.

There are towns whose names evoke a real horror in you because you have learned to link those names with atrocities, but, for the generation that follows your, those names will mean nothing; forgetting doesn't take long.

There are towns whose names evoke a real horror in you because you have learned to link those names with atrocities, but, for the generation that follows yours, those names will mean nothing; forgetting doesn't take long.

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.

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him.

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.

In one enciphering corner of my mind I believe still that every line in every poem is the orphaned caption of a lost photograph. By a related logic, each photograph sits in the antechamber of speech. Undissolved fragments of the past can be seen through the skin of photograph.