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Every Day Is for the Thief QUOTES

Every Day Is for the Thief QUOTES

1 " Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty naira for the man who helps you back out from the parking spot, two hundred naira for the police officer who stops you for no good reason in the dead of night, ten thousand for the clearing agent who helps you bring your imported crate through customs. For each transaction, there is a suitable amount that helps things on their way. No one else seems to worry, as I do, that the money demanded by someone whose finger hovers over the trigger of a AK-47 is less a tip than a ransom. I feel that my worrying about it is a luxury that few can afford. For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms--the categories are fluid--is not thought of in moral terms. It is seen either as a mild irritant or as an opportunity. It is a way of getting things done, neither more nor less than what money is there for. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

2 " Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize twenty years ago. I feel sure that his material hobbled him. Shillington, Pennsylvania, simply did not measure up to his extravagant gifts. And sadder yet are those who haven’t even a fraction of Updike’s talent and yet must hoe the same arid patch for stories. No "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

3 " there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

4 " what if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out? "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

5 " 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 , Every Day Is for the Thief

6 " 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 , Every Day Is for the Thief

7 " And yet, and yet. This place exerts an elemental pull on me. There is no end of fascinations. People talk all the time, calling on a sense of reality that is not identical to mine. They have wonderful solutions to some nasty problems; in this I see a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world. But also, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

8 " The thought is of the chain of corpses stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect Lagos with New Orleans. New Orleans was the largest market for human chattel in the New World. There were twenty-five different slave markets in the city in 1850. This is a secret only because no one wants to know about it. It was at those markets that buyers came to bid on the black men and women who had survived the crossing, but that is a history that is now literally submerged. Actually, it was submerged long before the recent flood, the city’s slaving past drowned in drink and jazz and Mardi Gras. High times: the best cure for history. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

9 " In the shadow of skyscrapers, half-nude men in dugouts cast nets into the lagoon. The work of arms and shoulders. I think of Auden’s line: Poetry makes nothing happen. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

10 " 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 , Every Day Is for the Thief

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

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

12 " It will finally be broadcast on the national news, to outrage, and to an instant forgetting. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

13 " There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

14 " I feel like a tuning fork, vibrating with an unfamiliar will to violence. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

15 " 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 , Every Day Is for the Thief

16 " The informal economy is the livelihood of many Lagosians. But corruption, in the form of piracy or of graft, also means that most people remain on the margins. 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. The advantage in these situations goes to the highest bidders, those individuals most willing to pay money or to test the limits of the law. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

17 " But also, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves. The "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

18 " They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything; and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief

19 " One morning, a child comes into the broad corridor of the house and greets me. I am shaving, unprepared for a guest. She calls me by name, and tells me who she is. We have never laid eyes on each other but we recognize each other immediately: first cousins. She was born after I left home, the last daughter of my father’s younger brother and, until this moment, we have only been rumors to each other. But so quickly do we get to know each other that, soon, I cannot even remember a time when I did not know her. She moved so easily all I could think of was sunlight. We spend hours on the sofa watching television. She teaches me about all the new films and the biggest music stars. I have brought some chocolates and a knapsack for her, so we almost have a fair exchange. I am awed by her silences and excited speech, her darkness, her self-possession. 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 , Every Day Is for the Thief

20 " The degree to which my family members wish me to be separate from the life of the city is matched only by my desire to know that life. The danfo, carrier of the masses, is the perfect symbol of our contest. The energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—converge at the bus stops. There is no better place to make an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home. "

― Teju Cole , Every Day Is for the Thief