Every Day Is for the Thief Quotes

“there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“what if everything that is to happen has already happened, and only the consequences are playing themselves out?”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“The completeness of a child is the most fragile and most powerful thing in the world. A child’s confidence is the world’s wonder.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“And yet, and yet. This place exerts an elemental pull on me. There is no end of fascinations. People talk all the time, calling on a sense of reality that is not identical to mine. They have wonderful solutions to some nasty problems; in this I see a nobility of spirit that is rare in the world. But also, there is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“The systems that could lift the majority out of poverty are undercut at every turn. Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“Why is history uncontested here? There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society. Where are the contradictory voices?”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“In the shadow of skyscrapers, half-nude men in dugouts cast nets into the lagoon. The work of arms and shoulders. I think of Auden’s line: Poetry makes nothing happen.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“There are other letters, from the heirs of fictional magnates, from the widows of oil barons, from the legal representatives of incarcerated generals, and they are such enterprising samples of narrative fiction that I realize Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“It will finally be broadcast on the national news, to outrage, and to an instant forgetting.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“The informal economy is the livelihood of many Lagosians. But corruption, in the form of piracy or of graft, also means that most people remain on the margins. The systems that could lift the majority out of poverty are undercut at every turn. Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut. The advantage in these situations goes to the highest bidders, those individuals most willing to pay money or to test the limits of the law.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“The thought is of the chain of corpses stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to connect Lagos with New Orleans. New Orleans was the largest market for human chattel in the New World. There were twenty-five different slave markets in the city in 1850. This is a secret only because no one wants to know about it. It was at those markets that buyers came to bid on the black men and women who had survived the crossing, but that is a history that is now literally submerged. Actually, it was submerged long before the recent flood, the city’s slaving past drowned in drink and jazz and Mardi Gras. High times: the best cure for history.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“They are emerging, these creatives, in spite of everything; and they are essential because they are the signs of hope in a place that, like all other places on the limited earth, needs hope.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“This is what it is to be a stranger: when you leave, there is no void.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“I feel like a tuning fork, vibrating with an unfamiliar will to violence.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“What, I wonder, are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“There is a disconnect between the wealth of stories available here and the rarity of creative refuge.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“And it is these heavily armed and poorly paid men who are entrusted with the work of protecting the citizenry.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief

“Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty naira for the man who helps you back out from the parking spot, two hundred naira for the police officer who stops you for no good reason in the dead of night, ten thousand for the clearing agent who helps you bring your imported crate through customs. For each transaction, there is a suitable amount that helps things on their way. No one else seems to worry, as I do, that the money demanded by someone whose finger hovers over the trigger of a AK-47 is less a tip than a ransom. I feel that my worrying about it is a luxury that few can afford. For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms--the categories are fluid--is not thought of in moral terms. It is seen either as a mild irritant or as an opportunity. It is a way of getting things done, neither more nor less than what money is there for.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“Balogun is found guilty and given six months in jail for the estimated fourteen billion naira he stole. Six months, that is, for a little over a hundred million dollars. There’s no reason, though, for believing that his is the most severe instance of theft.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms—the categories are fluid—is not thought of in moral terms. It is seen either as a mild irritant or as an opportunity. It is a way of getting things done, neither more nor less than what money is there for.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“I see music by Ali Farka Touré, by Salif Keïta. There are books by Philip Roth, Penelope Fitzgerald, and, as I had hoped, Michael Ondaatje.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“But the past continues to gather around like floodwater. A too easy formulation, but what past do I have in mind? The nation’s, I think. But perhaps I am also thinking of mine, perhaps the two are connected, the way a small segment of a coastline is formed with the same logic that makes the shape of the continental shelf.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“There are many lives and many years, and relatively few moments when those individual histories touch each other with real recognition.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“The mind roams more widely in the dark than it does in light. It is no surprise, then, stepping out of the unlit house into the unlit compound to find myself with the sudden thought, What if I inhabited another body and had a different destiny? We have all had these notions, perhaps while standing on a porch over a lake in the summer night as our friends enjoy a party indoors, or maybe on waking alone at three in the morning. Moments of great isolation. And there is that other thought: What if everything changed tonight? What if there is an explosion in the generator house? Nighted color seeps into the mind.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“I look at his hands. In those hands is new knowledge.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“The air in the strange, familiar environment of this city is dense with story, and it draws me into thinking of life as stories. The narratives fly at me from all directions. Everyone who walks into the house, every stranger I engage in conversation, has a fascinating story to deliver. The details I find so alluring in Gabriel García Márquez are here, awaiting their recording angel. All I have to do is prod gently, and people open up. And that literary texture, of lives full of unpredictable narrative, is what appeals.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“A wick, nameless, snuffed.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“One goes to the market to participate in the world. As with all things that concern the world, being in the market requires caution. The market—as the essence of the city—is always alive with possibility and danger. Strangers encounter each other in the world’s infinite variety; vigilance is needed. Everyone is there not merely to buy or sell, but because it is a duty. If you sit in your house, if you refuse to go to market, how would you know of the existence of others? How would you know of your own existence?”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“My shoulders are dropped back, my face is tensed, my eyes narrowed. It is difficult to keep from overdoing it at first, hard to recall how I had managed all those years ago, but I soon find the right register. The trick is to present an outward attitude of alertness, while keeping a calm and observant mood within. And there also has to be the will to be violent, a will that has to be available when it is called for.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

“Touting is not a job. It is a way of being in the world, a distillate of pure attitude: the chest puffed out, the body limber, the jaw set to brook no opposition. There is in every tout the same no-nonsense attitude, the quick temper, the willingness to get into a fight over any and all conflicts. There is a strut they do, a swagger. These are the original wiseguys of Lagos; some of them are as young as fourteen. They do not go home in the evening and stop being touts. The thing is bound to their souls. The regular non-tout Lagosian, too, has to share this attitude. The body language as one moves through the street has to be one of undiluted self-assurance. Uncertainty in the face or gait attracts attention, and attention is bad. When you catch a stranger’s eye, the message you send has to be unequivocal: “Trust me, you don’t want to mess with me.” There are many people on these streets who roam around looking for victims. People who, through long practice, can sniff out weakness wherever it is.”
― Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief