Trninic Aleksandar Quotes

Let me tell you what the problem is, Brik. Even if you knew what you want to know, you would still know nothing. You ask questions, you want to know more, but no matter how much more I tell you, you will never know anything. That's the problem. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

To write has to be related to a drive inside. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these little pieces, that's what it is. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability - the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Let me tell you a joke, Rora said.
Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself what the meaning of life is. He goes to work, but realizes that is not what life is or should be. He decides to read some philosophy and for years studies everything from the old Greeks onward, but can't find the meaning of life. Maybe it's the family, he thinks, so he spends time with his wife, Fata, and the kids, but finds no meaning in that and so he leaves them. He thinks, Maybe helping others is the meaning of life, so he goes to medical school, graduates with flying colors, goes to Africa to cure malaria and transplants hearts, but cannot discover the meaning of life. He thinks, maybe it's the wealth, so he becomes a businessman, starts making money hand over fist, millions of dollars, buys everything there is to buy, but that is not what life is about. Then he turns to poverty and humility and such, so he gives everything away and begs on the streets, but still he cannot see what life is. He thinks maybe it is literature: he writes novel upon novel, but the more he writes the more obscure the meaning of life becomes. He turns to God, lives the life of a dervish, reads and contemplates the Holy Book of Islam - still, nothing. He studies Christianity, then Judaism, then Buddhism, then everything else - no meaning of life there. Finally, he hears about a guru living high up in the mountains somewhere in the East. The guru, they say, knows what the meaning of lif ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

It is my belief that we as human beings have a need to tell stories - I think it's evolutionary. So you can think of the short story as a literary form, or you can instead think of stories. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Her hot attire did not signify promiscuity - contrary to the consensual interpretation of the other male teachers - but a kind of nostalgia: this was what she used to wear when she was happy, when she used to live the normal ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity ~ Aleksandar Hemon

The liar looks up toward it, hoping against hope that the voices in his head have told him the truth. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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? ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Home is where somebody notices your absence. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth living. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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

All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

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