Quote by Teju Cole: “The self is not a fixed thing; it is a process.”

We tend to think of ourselves as having a fixed personality or identity — something set in stone. But identity is actually something that keeps forming and reforming through our choices, experiences, and relationships. You're not finished becoming who you are, and that's not a problem — it's how life works.

Cole published Open City in 2011, a period of rapid cultural flux as social media was reshaping how people constructed and performed identity. The novel's unnamed narrator wanders New York and Brussels, processing the layered histories of migration and belonging.

Nigerian-American writer and photographer whose debut novel Open City won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 2012. His work fuses memoir, criticism, and fiction to examine race, movement, and identity in the postcolonial world.