Quotes from Ivo Andric

What does your sorrow do while you sleep? -It's awake and waiting. And when it loses patience, it wakes me up.

Searching for what I need, and I don't even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don't have and I've been searching for.

What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness.

I gave in to life. I was not defeated but outplayed.

When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices.

beautiful soul weeps deep~

What can and doesn't have to be always, at the end, surrenders to something that has to be.

It seems to me, that if people only knew how hard it was for me to endure life, they would find it easier to forgive me for all the wrong things I've done and all the good things that I have failed to do. And they would still find a little compassion within them to pity me.

There comes a time when a man finds himself in front of a dark uncrossable abyss, which he himself has spent years digging. He cannot go forward, and has no way back. Words have failed, tears won't help, and who would he call out to? He can't even remember his own name. Then the man sees that on this god's green earth there is but one true suffering: the torment of guilty conscience.

I do not fear invisible worlds.

I gave in to life. I was not defeated but outplayed.

When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

And then the death will come. The great parting, but the least painful of all the goodbyes we ever knew. For in death, only one shall grieve. And so far we have always, at every parting, grieved together.

In the journal of my misery, each sorrow competes for the first place in length and strength.

That wild beast which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free.

Forgetfulness heals everything and song is the most beautiful manner of forgetting, for in song man feels only what he loves.

There is no rule without revolts and conspiracies, even as there is no property without work and worry.

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.

One shouldn't be afraid of the humans. Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them.

If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.

Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.