Teju Cole Quotes

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.”

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…

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

the moment there is a power cut

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

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.”

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.

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.”