Open City 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.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“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.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“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, Open City

“I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”
― Teju Cole, 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, 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, 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, Open City

“He, too, was in the grip of rage and rhetoric. I saw that, attractive though his side of the political spectrum was. A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something. 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 magnificiently isolated from loyalties. But was that not an ethical lapse graver than rage itself?”
― Teju Cole, 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, 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, Open City

“The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“It is dangerous to live in a secure world.”
― Teju Cole, 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, 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, Open City

“I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“If you're too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too.”
― Teju Cole, 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, Open City

“There are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn’t right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population.”
― Teju Cole, 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, 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, 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, Open City

“Dignified refusal can only take you so far. Ask the Congolese.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“Nature is infinitely patient, one thing lives after another has given way; the magnolia's blooms die just as the cherry's come to life.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed around like a cloud.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man's will, a backdrop for his activities...I was primed to see a white man, a nobody in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him.”
― Teju Cole, 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, 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, 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, Open City