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Teju Cole QUOTES

Teju Cole QUOTES

161 " What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history? "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

162 " Khalil seemed to have gotten the communitarianism thing off his chest. Let me ask you something, he said, with mischief in his eye. The American blacks - he used the English expression - are they really as they are shown on MTV: the rapping, the hip-hop dance, the women? Because that's all we see here. Is it like this? Well, I said slowly in English, let me respond this way: Many Americans assume that European Muslims are covered from head to toe if they are women, or that they wear a full beard if they are men, and that they are only interested in protesting perceived insults to Islam. The man on the street - do you understand this expression? - the ordinary American probably does not imagine that Muslims in Europe sit in cafes drinking beer, smoking Marlboros, and discussing political philosophy. In the same way, American blacks are like any other Americans: they are like any other people. The hold the same kinds of jobs, they live in normal houses, they send their children to school. Many of them are poor, that is true, for reasons of history, and many of them do like hip-hop and devote their lives to it, but it's also true that some of them are engineers, university professors, lawyers, and generals. Even the last two secretaries of state have been black.
They are victims of the same portrayals as we are, Farouq said. Khalil agreed with him. The same portrayal, I said, but that's how power is, the one who has the power controls the portrayal. They nodded. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

163 " NOT ALL VIOLENCE is hot. There’s cold violence, too, which takes its time and finally gets its way. Children going to school and coming home are exposed to it. Fathers and mothers listen to politicians on television calling for their extermination. Grandmothers have no expectation that even their aged bodies are safe: any young man may lay a hand on them with no consequence. The police could arrive at night and drag a family out into the street. Putting a people into deep uncertainty about the fundamentals of life, over years and decades, is a form of cold violence. "

― Teju Cole ,

164 " A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. Action led to action, free of any moorings, and the way to be someone, the way to catch the attention of the young and recruit them to one’s cause, was to be enraged. It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself? "

― Teju Cole , Open City

165 " ...Freud suggested that, in normal mourning, one internalizes the dead. The dead are fully assimilated into the living, a process he called introjection. "

― Teju Cole

166 " 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 my 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. I don't agree with what Al-Qaeda did, they use a method I would not use, so I cannot say the word support. But I don't cast judgement on them. As I said before, Julius, and I think you should understand this: in my opinion, the Palestinian question is the central question of our time. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

167 " He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You can wait forever, and no one will give you that value. "

― Teju Cole

168 " The doors of our fridges, glimpses of cleavage, images of our birthday cakes, the setting sun: cheap photography makes visible the ways in which we are similar, and have for a long time been similar. Now we have proof, again, and again, and again. The "

― Teju Cole ,

169 " It has become hard to stand still, wrapped in the glory of a single image, as the original viewers of old paintings used to do. The flood of images has increased our access to wonders and at the same time lessened our sense of wonder. We live in inescapable surfeit. A number of artists are using this abundance as their starting point, setting their own cameras aside and turning to the horde—collecting and arranging photographs that they have found online. These artist-collectors, in placing one thing next to another, create a third thing—and this third thing, like a subatomic particle produced by a collision of two other particles, carries a charge. A "

― Teju Cole ,

170 " Prayer was, I had long settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present, of giving a name to the heart’s desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

171 " And as I stood there in the whipping wind and rain, I wondered if indeed it was that simple, if time was so free with memory, so generous with pardons, that writing well could come to stand in the place of an ethical life. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

172 " One song we hear too often is the one in which Africa serves as a backdrop for white fantasies of conquest and heroism. From the colonial project to Out of Africa to The Constant Gardener and Kony 2012, Africa has provided a space onto which white egos can conveniently be projected. It is a liberated space in which the usual rules do not apply: a nobody from America or Europe can go to Africa and become a godlike savior or, at the very least, have his or her emotional needs satisfied." (from "Known and Strange Things" by Teju Cole) "

― Teju Cole ,

173 " concentration, the suspension of time, an unobtrusive wit. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

174 " The single eye of his machine collects the event: this fragile body, which, shed of clothes, is now like a dark sapling whipped about in the wind. The tire is flung around the boy. He is losing consciousness but revives with sudden panic when he is doused with petrol. From the distance, two traffic officers, the ones they call Yellow Fever, watch. The splashing liquid is lighter than water, it is fragrant, it drips off him, beads in his woolly hair. He glistens. The begging stops. He stops begging and he is not yet lit. The whites of his eyes are bright as lamps. And then only the last thing, which is soon supplied. The fire catches with a loud gust, and the crowd gasps and inches back. The boy dances furiously but, hemmed down by the tire, quickly goes prone, and still. The most vivid moment in the fire’s life passes, and its color dulls and fizzes out. The crowd, chattering and sighing, momentarily sated, melts away. The man with the digicam lowers his machine. He, too, disappears. Traffic quickly reconstitutes around the charred pile. The air smells of rubber, meat, and exhaust. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

175 " There are other writers whose work is connected with everyday life and with the history of the people. And this doesn’t mean they have any connection to nationalist ideals. Sometimes, they even suffer more at the hands of nationalists. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

176 " I reiterate Beowulf, I recite my Yoruba tongue-twister, I tell Lucian Freud’s joke: we are creatures of private convention. "

― Teju Cole ,

177 " But, Julius, I don't know what you do in Africa, but I must say, I'm ready to fo 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. Who might say ninety years is not enough? It is time. I say down next to him and held his small, cold hand in mine. He was tired, and I left him, so that he could rest. I told him I would return soon. "

― Teju Cole , Open City

178 " He is one of those people just on the cusp of escaping the contemporary and slipping into the historical—John Coltrane would have turned eighty-eight in the same year; Martin Luther King, Jr., would have turned eighty-five—people who could still be with us but who feel, at times, very far away, as though they lived centuries ago. "

― Teju Cole ,

179 " Rural landscapes can give the double illusion of being eternal and newly born. Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into. "

― Teju Cole ,

180 " The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history. "

― Teju Cole , Open City