“Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“Malcolm X recognized that difference contains its own value, and that the struggle must be to advance that value. Martin Luther King is admired by everyone, he wants everyone to join together, but this idea that you should let them hit you on the other side of your face, this makes no sense to me.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“It is dangerous to live in a secure world.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“Then he said, Let me tell you a story from our tradition, a story about King Solomon. King Solomon gave a teaching once about the snake and the bee. The snake, King Solomon said, defends itself by killing. But the bee defends itself by dying. You know how a bee dies after a sting? Like that. It dies to defend. So, each creature has a method that is suitable to its strength.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd. 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 my audience, and gave voice to another’s words.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“It’s a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“I know the tells of those who blame others, those who are unable to see that they themselves, and not the others, are the common thread in all their bad relationships.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“There’s always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation. It’s an expectation that works sometimes, I said, but only if your enemy is not a psychopath. You need an enemy with a capacity for shame. I wonder sometimes how far Gandhi would have gotten if the British had been more brutal. If they had been willing to kill masses of protesters. Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“This is why Said means so much to me, he said. You see, Said was young when he heard that statement made by Golda Meir, that there are no Palestinian people, and when he heard this, he became involved in the Palestinian question. He knew then that difference is never accepted. You are different, okay, but that difference is never seen as containing its own value. Difference as orientalist entertainment is allowed, but difference with its own intrinsic value, no. You can wait forever, and no one will give you that value.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“My presentation—the dark, unsmiling, solitary stranger—made me a target for the inchoate rage of the defenders of Vlaanderen. I could, in the wrong place, be taken for a rapist or “Viking.” But the bearers of the rage could never know how cheap it was. They were insensitive to how common, and how futile, was their violence in the name of a monolithic identity. This ignorance was a trait angry young men, as well as their old, politically powerful rhetorical champions, shared the world over.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“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.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“I often paint a detailed picture in my mind of what I would like the end of my life to look like. I think of saying goodbye to Clara and other people I love, then I picture an empty house, perhaps a large, rambling rural mansion somewhere near the marshes where I grew up; I imagine a bath upstairs, which I can fill with warm water; and I think of music playing all through this big house, Crescent, maybe, or Ascension, filling the spaces not taken up by my solitude, reaching me in the bath, so that when I slip across the one-way border, I do so to the accompaniment of modal harmonies heard from far away.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
“I must say, I’m ready to go into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I’ve done enough, I think, I’ve had a good life, and I’m in such terrible pain just now.”
― Teju Cole, quote from Open City
Teju Cole
Born place: in The United States
Born date June 27, 1975
See more on GoodReads
“It was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful—for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor. When she told her friends in New York about this curious historical anomaly and the pervasive ethnic bias, they were incredulous at the thought that the friendly, well-mannered Japanese they knew could ever think she was somehow criminal, lazy, filthy, or aggressive—the negative stereotypical traits of Koreans in Japan.”
― Min Jin Lee, quote from Pachinko
“Don't leave anything you can't come back to.”
― Ruth Emmie Lang, quote from Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance
“But then, people usually do miss what's right in front of them.”
― Lisa Maxwell, quote from The Last Magician
“لو كنا خيّرين تقائياً وموجّهين طبيعياً نحو الخير لما كانت هناك حاجة لوصايا زجرية. لا بل نحن بعيدون كل البعد عن ذلك كما تلاحظ دون شك... إنما وفي أغلب الأوقات, نحن لا نجد صعوبة في معرفة مايجب القيام به من أجل العمل الصالح, لكننا لا نتوقف عن السماح لأنفسنا ببعض الاستثناءات, وذلك لأننا وبكل بساطة نفضل أنفسنا على الآخرين! لهذا السبب يدعونا الواجب الملزم للمزيد من "الضغط على الذات" ولبذل الجهود من أجل الاستمرار في التقدم والتحسن”
― Luc Ferry, quote from A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living
“The fact was that between the autumn of 1941, when he started being given hormone and steroid injections, and the second half of 1944, when first the cocaine and then above all the Eukodal kicked in, Hitler hardly enjoyed a sober day.”
― quote from Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany
The Dark Half
Something Wonderful
Ellen Foster
The Kindly Ones
The Winner's Crime
Turtles All the Way...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
