Quotes from Aleksandar Hemon

Tell the fucking story.

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.

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

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

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

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

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.

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.

Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self.

Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.

Shiny teeth were footnote to her smile.

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

Don't you wonder sometimes," sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, "about sound and vision?

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.

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 took me about fifteen minutes to get to the hospital, through traffic that existed in an entirely different space-time.

At worst, she kept him around so he could make her feel better when she needed it, a winning combination of a pet and a dildo.

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

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.

I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.

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.

It's not about where you belong, it's about what belongs to you," I told her...I was twenty-seven (and a half) and Sarajevo belonged to me.

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?

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.