Quotes from Aleksandar Hemon

Afternoon at the Coffee Shoppe slipped into evening just as Joshua's caffeination reached the heights of the Rwandan plantations where his beverage originated.

Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently.

Do you hear that, Dillon? Inadvertent self-wedgie! Write that down! That's what you want your characters to say, not some anodyne bullshit about corporate greed.

It felt like lying, only better, because he couldn't be caught, and he couldn't be caught because there was nothing to verify it against. Immersed in the flow of bullshit, they had no reason, or time, not to believe him.

a good time to be thinking about all that, given that we're just about to tear a new hole in the ass of Iraq.

If Joshua had to put one sticker on his car (which he didn't have) it would be: Whatever is, is either in itself or in the other. Who on the street would ever understand what that meant?

Ordering wine in this place was not unlike ordering milk—he was fortunate there were no real (or any) men at the bar to mock his pussiness.

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

it. In the mind there is no free will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.

What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?

was. He wasn't so much jealous as he wanted Kimiko to confess that she experienced lust independent of him—the thought of her sovereign lechery turned him on, because it frightened him.

But nothing has ever been—nor will it ever be—the way it used to be.

The sad fact of life was that there were no cruising spots for heterosexual men. If there were, Joshua would be parked somewhere every day of his life, willing to sleep with any woman generous enough to pull up alongside him.

They say, as the gardener, so the garden.

Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.

You can experience and understand history only when you're inside it, but when you're inside it you don't have time or gumption for understanding. All you want is just to stay alive, for which understanding is not necessary. You have no access to history's complex, catastrophic logic, which is indelibly overwhelming and incomprehensible, particularly as you're trying to survive.

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.

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

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.