Quotes from Semezdin Mehmedinovi?

Mi sebi rado postavljamo metafizi?ka pitanja o svijetu, životu i ?ovjeku. A trebali bismo iznova i stalno pitati: zašto s tolikim naporom i mukom živimo, kad znamo da ?emo ovdje biti samo jednom i kad imamo tako kratko i neponovljivo vrijeme u ovom neopisivo lijepom svijetu?

Najbolje fotografije uvijek ostanu nesnimljene. To je u redu. Ne treba sve završiti na fotografiji. Ono što je najvažnije treba da ostane u sje?anju.

Kao ukleti Holandezi lutamo u daljinama i usput nabasavamo na tragove svog svijeta, na nemogu?im mjestima, tamo gdje to najmanje o?ekujemo. I kamo god do?em, ja neprestano stižem ku?i.

The two of us weren't made for this world, because there's nothing in it we want to possess.

Trebalo bi dati Nobela onome koji je izmislio trešnju

And in fact, I am a foreigner everywhere in the world: as soon as I leave my home, I step into a void.

Where does our need to accelerate time come from? From impatience to arrive in the near future into which we have projected our trifling desires. Our need to slow time down would surely be natural. But why this strong desire to speed things up? Why are we always in a hurry to reach the future?

When we met, we were serious and old beyond our years, but then we began to grow backward and now we are two weary, frightened children.

People quickly forget evil because they still haven't created a language to describe it so the world refuses to carry the burden, preferring to forget.

I want to believe that her memory will soon come back, because we don't have the strength to fight against forgetting.

Here's what I think: there are neither major nor minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small. Those kind cannot fit in the heart.

The sky above the Sarajevo valley had never been so open and bare as on that winter night, in a city without electricity. We stood and stared upward in astonishment, and my friend Ivan said, in his long, drawn-out Belgrade accent: "The staaarry sky above us, and moraaal laaaw within us!

In a hospital the most important fact about us is the year of our birth. But in our lives that year is of no particular importance. I had to grow old to understand that. Everyone dies young.

Whenever I'm in the company of strangers and speak in a way that reveals my Slav accent, the question follows: "Where are you from?" I always reply politely. It's very important to me that I say exactly where I'm from, and explain where that place is in case the person I'm talking to has never hears of my country ("in Europe, near Italy"). I suppose that's the need in me to feel accepted for what I am.

Once, long ago, there was a world in which we called different languages "ours".

ALIFAKOVAC At the very eastern edge of Sarajevo a boy loaded down with an armful of roses — It's Bajram and he, the little merchant, is going to the graveyard loaded with roses loaded with a hundred course roses like a grave on the day of its digging Like a grave on the day of its digging the boy is climbing Alifakovac

In war, {freedom's} meaning is bound to the collective, making peace and freedom the same . . . The collective is a mob that suffers in silence, and waits.

That's what time was like, along with the things occupying it, that it made the feelings connected to any memory seem worthless.

Uli?ni protesti iz 1973. godine: za lakat mu se pridržava djevojka i on je nagnut unazad, prema njoj, ramenom je štiti, tako da je cijelo njegovo tijelo zauzelo položaj u odnosu na njeno prisustvo, a ne u odnosu na policiju ispred njih... i, eto, zna?i, to je ta Povijest? Sjena koju baca muško rame

The claim most often repeated by Karadzic - that people of different nationalities couldn't live together in Bosnia - was simply a euphemism for racism. The truth was quite the opposite: peoples of different cultures had lived together for so long in Bosnia, and the ethnic mix was so deep, that any separation could only be accomplished through extreme violence and enormous bloodshed.

A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.