Top 80 Teju Cole Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “The big idea behind it was to somehow participate in the discussion about justice. What does it mean to be just to the others out there whose lives we do not think about. One of the answers I came up with was simply tell their stories.”

— Teju Cole

53. “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.”

— Teju Cole

54. “I must say, I’m ready to go into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I’ve done enough, I think, I’ve had a good life, and I’m in such terrible pain just now.”

— Teju Cole

55. “Sebald, Naipaul, and Joyce are three of my biggest influences, all of them for their formal freedom and their ability to create mood. So those comparisons are immensely flattering and, of course, unearned.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

57. “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.”

— Teju Cole

58. “So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn’t use a smartphone, and he doesn’t discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.”

— Teju Cole

59. “What’s interesting about Twitter is the unmediatedness of it, the directness of it. I’m on a train somewhere in New York and I send out a tweet. Somebody sitting at dinner in Bombay checks their phone and they see it.”

— Teju Cole

60. “There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner...”

— Teju Cole

61. “I’m not trying to be in your face and take a picture that is like a journalistic kind of image. I got interested in a kind of complicated, compiled, visual field.”

— Teju Cole

62. “Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices?”

— Teju Cole

63. “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.”

— Teju Cole

64. “Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.”

— Teju Cole

65. “Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities... I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him.”

— Teju Cole

66. “There’s always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation. It’s an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

68. “There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated generals, and they are such enterprising samples of narrative fiction that I realize Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded.”

— Teju Cole

69. “I know the tells of those who blame others, those who are unable to see that they themselves, and not the others, are the common thread in all their bad relationships.”

— Teju Cole

70. “The strange thing, though, is that most people who write novels these days seem to be aware of only a fraction of its possibilities. Kundera goes on and on about this, and I never tire of reading him on the subject, because I agree very deeply with it.”

— Teju Cole

71. “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.”

— Teju Cole

72. “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.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

76. “There was a feeling during the years of George W. Bushs presidency that his gracelessness as well as his appetite for war were linked to his impatience with complexity. He acted from the gut, and was economical with the truth until it disappeared.”

— Teju Cole

77. “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.”

— Teju Cole

78. “What do I believe in? Imagination, gardens, science, poetry, love, and a variety of nonviolent consolations. I suspect that in this aggregate all this isn’t enough, but that’s where I am for now.”

— Teju Cole

79. “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.”

— Teju Cole

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

— Teju Cole

81. “Everything interesting was in the books; it was books that made me aware of the variety of the world.”

— Teju Cole

82. “Yes, there’s a relaying of internal states that only a novel can achieve. In my view, the novel is one of Europe’s greatest gifts to the world. America and Africa collaborated to give the world jazz. We’ll call it even.”

— Teju Cole

83. “The creative part of oneself finds its way out. In this case, I got interested particularly in the medium of Twitter and looked for ways to use it creatively.”

— Teju Cole

84. “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.”

— Teju Cole

85. “Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren’t we all?”

— Teju Cole

86. “But I didn’t, because I knew that my own fear of anti-Semitism, like my fear of racism, had through long practice become prerational. What I would impose on him would not be an argument, it would be a request that he adopt my reflexes, or the pieties of a society different from the one in which he grew up, or the one in which he now functioned. It would do little good to describe for him the subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying “Jews” instead of “Jewish people.”

— Teju Cole

87. “This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.”

— Teju Cole