26 quotes
Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut.”
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
And again, the empty space that was, I now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center. The place had become a metonym of its disaster.
Open City (2011)
Blacks, ‘we blacks’ had known rougher ports of entry [...] This was the acknowledgement he wanted, in his brusque fashion, from every ‘brother’ he met.
Open City (2011)
Sometimes it is hard to shake the feeling that, all jokes aside, there really is an epidemic of sorrow sweeping our world, the full brunt of which is being borne, for now, by only a luckless few.
Open City (2011)
I couldn't remember what life was like before I started walking.”
Open City (2011)
Did the Palestinians build the concentration camps? He said. What about the the Armenians: do their deaths mean less because they are not Jews.
Open City (2011)
Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand bribe
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
Help us fight corruption. If any employee of the consulate asks for a bribe or tip, please, have a discreet word with the Consul General
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
Church has become one of the biggest businesses in Nigeria… these Christians are militants, preaching a potent combination of a fear of hellfire and a love of financial prosperity…
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger.”
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.
Open City (2011)
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.
Open City (2011)
There’s strong leftist support for Palestinian causes in the United States. Many of my friends in New York, for example, think that Israel is doing terrible things in the Occupied Territories.
Open City (2011)
I suddenly feel a vague pity for all those writers who have to ply their trade from sleepy American suburbs, writing divorce scenes symbolized by the very slow washing of dishes.
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
I have mentally rehearsed a reaction for a possible encounter with such corruption at the airport in Lagos. But to walk in off a New York street and face a brazen demand for a bribe: that is a shock I am ill-prepared for.”
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
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.
Open City (2011)
the next Edward Said! I was going to do it by studying comparative literature and using it as a basis for societal critique.
Open City (2011)
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.”
Open City (2011)
the hardest thing to deal with, after weeks of constant power cuts, is the noise of the generators
Every Day Is for the Thief (2007)
In countries with a properly functioning legal system, the mob continues to exist, but it is rarely called upon to mete out capital punishment. The right to take human life belongs to the state. Not so in societies where weak courts and poor law enforcement are combined with intractable structural injustices.