Top 100 Aleksandar Hemon Quotes
#1. It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.
Aleksandar Hemon
#2. If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
#3. Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.
Aleksandar Hemon
#5. Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.
Aleksandar Hemon
#6. I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
#7. I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.
Aleksandar Hemon
#8. I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#9. There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it's worth putting up a fight.
Aleksandar Hemon
#10. Afternoon at the Coffee Shoppe slipped into evening just as Joshua's caffeination reached the heights of the Rwandan plantations where his beverage originated.
Aleksandar Hemon
#12. I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.
Aleksandar Hemon
#13. An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
Aleksandar Hemon
#14. Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
Aleksandar Hemon
#15. We know that laws ought to be obeyed only if they come out of people's sense of justice, not because the state needs them to preserve its power. Laws devised for the depravity of power are as worthless as the paper they are printed on.
Aleksandar Hemon
#16. One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
#17. And the world around me was nothing if not an infinity of distractions: cute girls, novels and comic books, my budding record collection, neighborhood boys whistling from the playground under my window, beckoning me to a soccer game.
Aleksandar Hemon
#18. I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
Aleksandar Hemon
#19. You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.
Aleksandar Hemon
#20. If someone imagines that someone loves him, and does not believe he has given any cause for it, he should love in return.
Aleksandar Hemon
#21. It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.
Aleksandar Hemon
#22. The end of the world might be near, Isador said to her once, but we don't have to rush to reach it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#23. It took me about fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, through traffic that existed in an entirely different space-time.
Aleksandar Hemon
#24. The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.
Aleksandar Hemon
#25. Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."
Aleksandar Hemon
#26. All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.
Aleksandar Hemon
#27. I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing
America was nothing if not good intentions.
Aleksandar Hemon
#28. The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.
Aleksandar Hemon
#29. It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
Aleksandar Hemon
#30. Ordering wine in this place was not unlike ordering milk - he was fortunate there were no real (or any) men at the bar to mock his pussiness.
Aleksandar Hemon
#31. It felt like lying, only better, because he couldn't be caught, and he couldn't be caught because there was nothing to verify it against. Immersed in the flow of bullshit, they had no reason, or time, not to believe him.
Aleksandar Hemon
#32. Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#33. To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
Aleksandar Hemon
#34. Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
Aleksandar Hemon
#35. He acquired the unknowable, variable depths; he could be anyone he wanted to be, and if he didn't like who he became, he could switch again, going in, going out. And who the fuck are you?
Aleksandar Hemon
#36. To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.
Aleksandar Hemon
#37. It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
#38. I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#39. When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.
Aleksandar Hemon
#40. I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
Aleksandar Hemon
#41. If you wait long enough, something will happen - there has never been a time when nothing happened.
Aleksandar Hemon
#42. I think it is about life. I think there is always more life than death. Those who lived are always alive for someone. Those who are alive remember life, not death. And when you are dead nothing happens. Death is nothing.
Aleksandar Hemon
#43. I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#44. I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
Aleksandar Hemon
#45. There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
#46. We wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.
Aleksandar Hemon
#47. What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
Aleksandar Hemon
#48. Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
Aleksandar Hemon
#49. I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.
Aleksandar Hemon
#50. I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
Aleksandar Hemon
#52. No one can desire to be blessed, to act well and to live well, unless at the same time he desires to be, to act, and to live, that is, to actually exist.
Aleksandar Hemon
#53. I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
Aleksandar Hemon
#54. Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.
Aleksandar Hemon
#55. The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.
Aleksandar Hemon
#56. I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.
Aleksandar Hemon
#57. People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
#58. I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.
Aleksandar Hemon
#59. I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
Aleksandar Hemon
#60. You've never been married, so you don't know, but it is a fragile thing. Nothing ever goes away, everything stays inside it. It is a different reality.
Aleksandar Hemon
#62. I like to blow up this notion that all we have to do as writers and artists is represent reality, which is presumably solid and self-evident, with no negotiation of the gap between myself and the world, between this body and this space, which needs narration to close it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#64. New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
Aleksandar Hemon
#65. I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have to do to put yourself in the meditating mode is stop narrating yourself to yourself.
Aleksandar Hemon
#66. If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living.
Aleksandar Hemon
#67. I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
Aleksandar Hemon
#68. For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).
Aleksandar Hemon
#70. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth
reality is the fastest American commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
#71. Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
Aleksandar Hemon
#72. There are people who just live and there are people who just survive," Bega had said. "Americans live, we survive.
Aleksandar Hemon
#73. And did the biblical Lazarus have a mother? What did she do when he was resurrected? Did he bid her good-bye before he returned to his undeath? Was he the same son to her undead as he was alive? I read that he sailed to Marseilles with his sisters afterward, where he may or may not have died again.
Aleksandar Hemon
#74. I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
Aleksandar Hemon
#75. Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
Aleksandar Hemon
#76. I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.
Aleksandar Hemon
#77. Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
Aleksandar Hemon
#78. We stood there, squeezing each other's hands as though trying to press through the flesh to the bones and then beyond. She kissed my cheek and neck, and I felt the joy of omnipresent love
everything around me speaking about me with affection, and Mary was listening.
Aleksandar Hemon
#79. The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.
Aleksandar Hemon
#80. I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.
Aleksandar Hemon
#81. Addressing the problem required standing up and shoving his hand into his pants to free his testicles from the grip of his underwear. He was not ready for such a commitment, so he endured. The mind can imagine nothing except while the body endures.
Aleksandar Hemon
#82. I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.
Aleksandar Hemon
#83. Don't you wonder sometimes," sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, "about sound and vision?
Aleksandar Hemon
#84. So you are Catholic? Didn't know that.
I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in this crap. They don't worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do.
Aleksandar Hemon
#85. I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.
Aleksandar Hemon
#87. Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.
Aleksandar Hemon
#89. I am just like everybody else ... because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
Aleksandar Hemon
#90. I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
Aleksandar Hemon
#91. Hi, she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#93. I did not intend to stay; I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.
Aleksandar Hemon
#94. All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
Aleksandar Hemon
#95. When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.
Aleksandar Hemon
#96. I will never know you, nothing about you, what has died inside you, what has lived invisibly. I am elsewhere now.
Aleksandar Hemon
#97. A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.
Aleksandar Hemon
#98. I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.
Aleksandar Hemon
#99. Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty - the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses.
Aleksandar Hemon
#100. Isabel's indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.
Aleksandar Hemon
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