Teju Cole

Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian.

Quotes

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.

I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.”
- Chapter 1, Page 7.

Hey, hey young guy, why trouble yourself? They'll take your money anyway, and they'll punish you by delaying your passport. Is that what you want? Aren't you more interested in getting your passport than trying to prove a point?
- Page 12.

I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”
- Chapter 3, Page 17.

Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the consulate asks for a bribe or tip, please, have a discreet word with the Consul General
- Page 13

Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand bribe
- Page 18

thousands of cars over the course of a day would pay toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors
- Page 18

the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators
- Page 55

Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”
- Chapter 3, Page 19.

Church has become one of the biggest businesses in Nigeria… these Christians are militants, preaching a potent combination of a fear of hellfire and a love of financial prosperity…
- Page 109

Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, rises out of the Sahel like a modernist apparition. The avenues are clean and broad and the government buildings are imposing, with that soulless, vaguely fascistic air common to all capitals cities of the world…
- Page 108

while the buildings and roads of the capital city suggest a rational, orderly society, the reality is the opposite
- Page 109

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.
- Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 3.

And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster.
- Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 52

Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.
- Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 55.

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?
- Chapter 8, Page 107.

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.
- Chapter 11, Page 141.

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.
- Chapter 12, Page 155.

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.
- Chapter 16, Page 192.

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.
- Chapter 17, Page 208.

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. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
- Chapter 20, Page 243.

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables.”
- Julius

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.”
- Julius

And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster.
- Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 52

Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.
- Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 55

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.
- Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 3

There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories.
- Page 118

Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews.
- Page 122

the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique.
- Page 128

They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left school. Plagiarism? The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, I think this is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had me on September 20, 2001..That was the year I lost my illusions about Europe.
- Page 129

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Teju Cole