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Category: Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon

-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn’t matter.

silence, talking

Aleksandar Hemon

I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.

america, balkan, hate

Aleksandar Hemon

The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.

balkan, balkans, writers, writers-on-writing, writers-quotes, writing-life

Aleksandar Hemon

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.

body, desire, lust, pleasure

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.

confidence, individuality, insecurity

Aleksandar Hemon

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

enlightenment, religious-fallacies, salvation, suffering

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.

honor, humanity, suffering, war

Aleksandar Hemon

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

fairness, hope, innocence, spring

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.

desires, possess

Aleksandar Hemon

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

chess, losing, sports, strategy, winning

Aleksandar Hemon

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

cataclysm, disaster, euphoria, guilt

Aleksandar Hemon

-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband’s heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn’t move so carelessly in their own apartment.

goodness, serbia, sniper, war