Teju Cole Quotes
It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.
Quotes to Explore
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There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says, 'Don't worry - everything will be just fine,' and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.
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I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.
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Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.
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I don't understand why women journalists always ask women about motherhood? It's far more important and interesting for women to talk about their work, their thoughts, their creativity and their individual identity.
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Religion is the opium of the masses.
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Bragging about yourself violates norms of modesty and politeness - and if you were really competent, your work would speak for itself.
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I like politics. I like traveling in the United States.
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If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do matters very much.
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I directed the men in our barque to approach near the savages, and hold their arms in readiness to do their duty in case they notice any movement of these people against us.
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If you can draw something from my life that helps, more power to you.
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But I'm very careful with opinions because I never know what the truth is. When I read what the press says about me, I don't really believe what it says about other people.
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Then you will do away with the only social meetings at the Art Academy in London we have, the only occasion on which we all come together in an easy, unrestrained manner. When we have no varnishing days, we shall not know one another.
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Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
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Reason is lost reasoning.
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One of the reasons why my album is called 'Forget the World' is because when you listen to the world, you make stupid mistakes.
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I am in love with stories of underdogs.
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In other words, New York has gone all suburban and bourgeois on us.
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I had such a supportive family, and I think that affects your life in such a profound way; it fortifies you completely.
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We like to bully deadlines. Pick on them; make fun of them; even spit on them sometimes. But what a terrible thing to do. Deadlines are actually our best friends.
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The worst thing about all this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. ... It is not true. ... Social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man or woman who walks through its very midst.
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Ah, Lord, if I doubt You, it is perhaps because You hide Yourself so well.
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There are problems with nursing - such as the issue of nurses all having to do degrees these days. But that doesn't mean to say the entire infrastructure of nursing is falling about and that it is populated by unfeeling psychopaths, which is, frankly, the implication sometimes.
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Few of the great tragedies of history were created by the village idiot, and many by the village genius.
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It's an Obama book, certainly. I was delighted, and astonished, to hear recently that he was reading it. It's a book about a new kind of American reality, one that takes diversity for granted. It doesn't celebrate diversity, actually, it just says: this is how we live now.
