Quotes from Josip Novakovich

Why do we have two ears and one mouth? In order to talk half as much as we listen.

I took a walk from Friedrichstrasse Station. That appears to be the train station from which I left in 1983 and in 1988. Then, it was a threatening place, with policemen carrying machine guns and parading around with dogs. Today I walked out to a commercial paradise of stores and of—policemen with machine guns and German shepherds. In fact, there were more police now than then.

They had talked about how to lose weight. One was telling another that she ought to eat nothing but protein— meats, tofu, eggs—and salads. And for it to work, she needed to have a nutrition guru. They were equally overweight, and this was clearly theoretical rather than practical knowledge.

I became sensitive, or at least hypocritical.

Quite a few people are here to study the European Union. Perhaps there is such a thing as the European Union.

Quite a few people are here to study the European Union. Perhaps there is such a thing as the European Union. When I am on the bus, I don't see or feel any union. I see all sorts of things, but that sort of big newspaper-headlines knowledge is not with me, nor do I want it to shape the phenomenology of the place.

Love of ruins for an architect, he claimed, was quite natural, at least after a long career.

Dialogue is easy. It's what you've been doing almost every day, most of your life.

You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing than while not writing...

He must have given up on image making because his eyes had failed to see something they had yearned for; his mind had failed to capture whatever it had hoped, and that probing gaze perhaps expressed alarm at the emptying of his vision, at the dissolution of the things see, observed, into a meaningless vastness.

But that did not make Mirko happy - the world was melting away; what was a grade compared with the world? He gazed through the windows and watched the thickly falling snow.

Strangely enough, I am beginning to feel like an exile when I go to a polling station in PA and people hold placards approving attacking Middle Eastern countries, supporting the troops. Imagine if in Nazi Germany people said, Look, we know the war is wrong, but we love our boys and we support them. It's the wrong time to withhold our support now that they are struggling for German ideals, defending Auschwitz. The comparison is extreme, but why support the troops in an unsupportable war?

I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.

Countries change, of course, and it is still the same country, in a way, resembling a McCarthy America, except that McCarthy's America was not in debt. This is a bankrupt America, bankrupted partly by its suspicions and overspending on the military and over-reliance on consumerism.

This was his third attempt to escape Yugoslavia, for which he was rewarded by two years of treatment in the insane asylum. The official political reasoning was simple: if you wanted to leave a healthy society like socialist Yugoslavia to live in the decadent West, you were insane.

When fatness was an exception, it was part of the canon of beauty. Now that leanness is an exception, its symptoms are canonized.

I was caught between the crossfire of the atheist school and a Baptist church and family. Both had a prescription for how I was supposed to think and behave. On most points, they actually agreed. I was supposed to be clean, have short hair, talk modestly, listen and obey, never fight. Consequently, I was slovenly, grew long hair, and fought every day.

My friend gave me an opportunity to be bad, that is, free.

Describing men, of course, I run into the same problems—aquiline nose, chiseled features, bullish neck, leonine hair, steely gaze, bronze tan—but somehow the arsenal of clichés and materials for describing men seems smaller. Many feminists are right to claim that the male is on the whole less objectified than the female; the male is treated more frequently as the subject rather than the object.

The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue.

Enemies keep you alert, competitive, and friendships lull you into mediocrity, and through peer pressure, keep you back and down, and eventually, down and out. Some of the most excellent friends I knew in my hometown became alcoholics, and true enough, they are fun to talk with, telling jokes and anecdotes, but they sacrificed their lives to their friendships, proving that they were fun, that they were not betraying friends by leaving hometown for large cities and countries and professions.

I remember, in former East Berlin, how startling it was to see the wall cut some streets. The street would go straight into the wall. It would continue on the other side, in another world. At least one street should have remained like that, walled, to remind people of the old division.

It was clear that people were not rushing to the shelves. In fact, I'd never seen anybody in a library pick up a small literary journal.

Late at night, my friend Boris and I stood by the tracks and the train passed with orange lights in all its windows but not a single passenger head to be seen. Where are the passengers? I asked. The train is empty? Oh, they are there, you just don't see them. They're on the floor. There used to be snipers all along the tracks and so there are stretches of the rails where people all lie down on the floor so they won't be shot.