Teju Cole

Born 1975

From Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States · Nationality: United States, Nigeria · Writes fiction

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.”
Every Day Is for the Thief
“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…”
Every Day Is for the Thief, p. 108
“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.”
Open City, Chapter 16
“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.”
Open City, Chapter 12
“the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators”
Every Day Is for the Thief, p. 55

Books by Teju Cole in order

Books by Teju Cole in the order they were published, from Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) to Pharmakon (2024).