Aleksandar Hemon

“...-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter. One had to protect from the onslaught of wasted words the silent place deep inside oneself, where all the pieces could be arranged in a logical manner, where the opponents abided by the rules, where even if you ran out of possibilities there might be a way to turn defeat into victory.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.”

“While customarily splling coffee grounds all over the counter, 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.”

“Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.”

“I will never know you, nothing about you, what has died inside you, what has lived invisibly. I am elsewhere now.”

“Death comes and takes you away and there is nothing you can do.”

“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.”

“If there are more dead than living, then the world is about death, and the question is: What are we to do with all the death? Who is going to remember all the dead?”

“What is life? This is no life. Who wants this life?The dead leave it to us to struggle in this world. They go elsewhere, wherever it is, and wait for God to sort it all out. But we have to stay here, no matter how hard it is. Nobody can be alone. Life is the life of others. My life, your life, that is nothing.”

“We are within our life and we stay there for as long as possible, that's our home. We need life. There is too much death already, and there is probably more coming our way.”

“God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?”

“I know as well as anybody how hard it is to live after a grave loss. But life needs to go on, it must never stop. It is our duty to keep life going.”

“Let me tell you what the problem is, Brik. Even if you knew what you want to know, you would still know nothing. You ask questions, you want to know more, but no matter how much more I tell you, you will never know anything. That's the problem.”

“If you wait long enough, something will happen - there has never been a time when nothing happened.”

“It never ends, Pinya says. Every time, you think maybe this here is a different world, but it's all the same: they live, we die. So here it is again.”

“She could slip out of her shoes and leave them right here, stuck in the muck, and then get rid of her dress and everything else: her mind, her life, her pain. The abandon of having nothing to lose, the freedom of being divested of all earthly burdens, ready for the Messiah, or death. Everything is attracted by its end.”

“The end of the world might be near, Isador said to her once, but we don't have to rush to reach it.”

“The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.”

“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.”

“If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living.”

“My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying of the garbage so that tomorrow - assuming there would be a tomorrow - could be filled up with new life. You die, you forget, you wake up knew.”

“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.”

“It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.”

“Let me tell you a joke, Rora said.Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of life is. So Mujo goes east, travels for years, walks roads, climbs the mountain, finds the stairs that lead up to the guru. He ascends the stairs, tens of thousands of them, nearly dies getting up there. At the top, there are millions of pilgrims, he has to wait for months to get to the guru. Eventually it is his turn, he goes to a place under a big tree, and there sits the naked guru, his legs crossed, his eyes closed, meditating, perfectly peaceful - he surely knows the meaning of life, Mujo says: I have dedicated my life to discovering the meaning of life and I have failed, so I have come to ask you humbly, O Master, to divulge the secret to me. The guru opens his eyes, looks at Mujo, and calmly says, My friend, life is a river. Mujo stares at him for a long time, cannot believe what he heard. What's life again? Mujo asks. Life is a river, the guru says. Mujo nods and says, You turd of turds, you goddamn stupid piece of shit, you motherfucking cocksucking asshole. I have wasted my life and come all this way for you to tell me that life is a fucking river. A river? Are you kidding me? That is the stupidest, emptiest fucking thing I have ever heard. Is that what you spent your life figuring out? And the guru says, What? It is not a river? Are you saying it is not a river?”

“I take picture because i like to look at the pictures I take.It seems to me that when people take a picture of something, they instantly forget about it.They can look at the picture and remind themselves.”

“People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is life without beauty, love, and justice?”

“We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.”

“Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.”

“I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.”

“Home is where somebody notices your absence.”

“Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.”

“Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?”

“Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?”

“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.”

“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.”

“The detectives ransack the place with the passion of soldiers fighting a just war.”

“Chief Shippy stands frozen, holding his breath, exhaling with relief as the young man dies, the gun smoke slowly moving across the room, like a school of fish.”

“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.”

“Much like Ella, I'd found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I'd needed narrative space to to extend myself into; I'd needed more lives. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums. I'd cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me--they did what I wouldn't, or couldn't, do. Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.”

“You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that's what it is.”

“She was beautiful; my breath was taken; we were still lonely; she said yes.”

“We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.”

“Mujo is a refugee in Germany, has no job, but has a lot of time, so he goes to a Turkish bath. The bath is full of German businessmen with towels around their waists, huffing and puffing, but every once in a while a cell phone rings and they pull their phone out from under the towel and say, Bitte? Mujo seems to be the only one without a cell phone, so he goes to the bathroom and stuffs toilet paper up his butt. He walks back out, a long trail of toilet paper behind him. So a German says, you have some paper, Herr, sticking out behind you. Oh, Mujo says, it looks like I have received a fax.”

“What you see is what you see, but that is never everything. Sarajavo is Sarajevo whatever you see or don't see. America is America. The past and future exist without you. And what you don't know about me is still my life. What I don't know about you is still your life. Nothing at all depends on you seeing it or not seeing it. I mean, who are you? You don't have to see or know everything.”

“I deigned to suggest to him that it was also the American thing -- America was nothing if not good intentions.”

“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.”

“My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.”

“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.”