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Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

Aleksandar Hemon quote from classy quote

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Home Life

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.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Life Photographs Photography Pictures

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Life Nightmares Shadows

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

Aleksandar Hemon Life

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.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Death Dying Imagination Non Being Nonexistence

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

Aleksandar Hemon Distance Love Relationships

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

Aleksandar Hemon Life Love Relationships

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

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Hand Me Downs Time

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

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon City Exteriority Geography Home Interiority Soul

When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Imagines Mind Power

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon City Mind

While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Love Reality Vision

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

Aleksandar Hemon Children Death Tumor

The cafeteria in the Chicago’s Children’s Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world—and forever it shall be—with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Children Children S Hospital Doctors Grilled Cheese Sandwich Hospital Cafeteria

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Belief Delusions

One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language—the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn’t want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn’t want to know what we did; we didn’t want to know it either.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Clichés Communication Problem Illness Platitudes Words Words Failed

Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Honor Humanity Suffering War

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Enlightenment Religious Fallacies Salvation Suffering

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

Aleksandar Hemon Confidence Individuality Insecurity

The world is always greater than your desires, plenty is never enough.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Contentment Desire Life

He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Body Desire Lust Pleasure

The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Balkan Balkans Writers Writers On Writing Writers Quotes Writing Life

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

Aleksandar Hemon America Balkan Hate

-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.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Silence Talking

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

Aleksandar Hemon Atheism Atheist God Religion

One person's garbage is another person's commodity.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Balkan Philosophical Philosophy Philosophy Of Life

Tell the fucking story.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Story

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Existence

Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Storytelling Writing

Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Absence Absence Of You Sorrow

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.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Control Life Loss Of Control Moments

-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Goodness Serbia Sniper War

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Cataclysm Disaster Euphoria Guilt

Only gay bars were full, the heterosexual joints were empty—the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Gay Heterosexual

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Chess Losing Sports Strategy Winning

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Desires Possess

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

Aleksandar Hemon Fairness Hope Innocence Spring

What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Boys

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

Aleksandar Hemon Work Singing Party

I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.

~ Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Path Game Sin
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