"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."
"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."
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Source: Teju Cole (2011). “Open City: A Novel”, p.11, Random House
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"Writing as writing. Writing as rioting. Writing as righting. On the best days, all three."
"The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege."
"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."
"The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening."
"Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places."