Teju Cole

“Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.”

“I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.”

“From Sachs to Kristof to Invisible Children to TED, the fastest growth industry in the US is the White Savior Industrial Complex. The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening. The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm. This world exists simply to satisfy the needs - including, importantly, the sentimental needs - of white people and Oprah.”

“I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”

“It is dangerous to live in a secure world.”

“But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.”

“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.”

“Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.”

“I had hoped for grace," I said, "not immortality"I wonder why so many people view sickness as a moral test. It has nothing to do with morals or grace. It's a physical test, and usually we lose.”

“I'll tell you why the six million matter so much: it is because the Jews are the chosen people. Forget the Cambodians, forget the American blacks, this is unique suffering. But I reject this idea. It is not a unique suffering. What about the twenty million under Stalin? It isn't better if you are killed for ideological reasons. Death is death. All death is suffering. Others have suffered too, and that is history, suffering.”

“Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.”

“You must have been determined, I said. Well, no, no, you don't think of it like that, she said, you just find what you must do, and you do it.”

“As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.”

“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.”