Aleksandar Hemon
Hemon graduated from the University of Sarajevo with a degree in literature in 1990. He moved to Chicago, Illinois in 1992 and found that he was unable to write in Bosnian and spoke little English.
In 1995, he started writing works in English and managed to showcase his work in prestigious magazines such as the New Yorker and Esquire. He is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. He lives in Chicago.
“There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.”
“I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.”
“The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth. ”
“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.”
“When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.”
“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. ”
“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. ”
“There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.”
“Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.”
“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. ”
“The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.”
“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. ”
“Hi," she said, in a whispery voice, and nodded as if to confirm that she really meant it.”
“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.”
“Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.”