Top 80 Teju Cole Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

— Teju Cole

2. “The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

4. “For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.”

— Teju Cole

5. “Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.”

— Teju Cole

6. “The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.”

— Teju Cole

7. “I’m not hopeful about America, and I’m not hopeful about the world, no. Life goes on and, for those of us who are lucky, there’s a great deal to enjoy in it. But will things get better for most people? I don’t know. I don’t see the evidence.”

— Teju Cole

8. “Life’s too short for anxious score-keeping.”

— Teju Cole

9. “I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

11. “Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.”

— Teju Cole

12. “At the emergence of the modern novel with Rabelais and Cervantes, all kinds of things were possible in a long-form prose work. Within a couple of hundred years, most of those possibilities were abandoned in favor of a text that efficiently transmitted sentiments.”

— Teju Cole

13. “I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.”

— Teju Cole

14. “If you see a theme that you might want to take a photo of, you sort of stand there for an hour waiting for it to resolve, waiting for the geometry of a theme to be exactly what you want them to be. That was my process to get photos.”

— Teju Cole

15. “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.”

— Teju Cole

16. “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.”

— Teju Cole

17. “Mohamed Choukri – For Bread Alone – translated by Paul Bowles.”

— Teju Cole

18. “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.”

— Teju Cole

19. “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.”

— Teju Cole

20. “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.”

— Teju Cole

21. “Then he said, Let me tell you a story from our tradition, a story about King Solomon. King Solomon gave a teaching once about the snake and the bee. The snake, King Solomon said, defends itself by killing. But the bee defends itself by dying. You know how a bee dies after a sting? Like that. It dies to defend. So, each creature has a method that is suitable to its strength.”

— Teju Cole

22. “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.”

— Teju Cole

23. “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.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

25. “Being Nigerian is a strong part of my identity. Being American is a strong part of my identity. And there are important parts of who I am that really have nothing to do with my national connection.”

— Teju Cole

26. “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.”

— Teju Cole

27. “We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

29. “Always say no pun intended to draw attention to the intended pun.”

— Teju Cole

30. “One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

32. “If you’re too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.”

— Teju Cole

33. “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.”

— Teju Cole

34. “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.”

— Teju Cole

35. “A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.”

— Teju Cole

36. “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.”

— Teju Cole

37. “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.”

— Teju Cole

38. “Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.”

— Teju Cole

39. “How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed around like a cloud.”

— Teju Cole

40. “To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

42. “The systems that could lift the majority out of poverty are undercut at every turn. Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

44. “It is dangerous to live in a secure world.”

— Teju Cole

45. “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.”

— Teju Cole

46. “I schooled in the Boston area.”

— Teju Cole

47. “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.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

49. “It’s an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It’s a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn’t celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.”

— Teju Cole

50. “The completeness of a child is the most fragile and most powerful thing in the world. A child’s confidence is the world’s wonder.”

— Teju Cole