Quotes from Aleksandar Hemon

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

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.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.

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.

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

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

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.

Home is where somebody notices your absence.

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.

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

If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.

I will never know you, nothing about you, what has died inside you, what has lived invisibly. I am elsewhere now.

We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.

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

The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.

While customarily splling coffee grounds all over the counter, I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

But the moment you point at a difference, you enter, regardless of age, an already existing system of differences, a network of identities, all of them ultimately arbitrary and unrelated to your intentions, none of them a matter of your choice. The moment you other someone, you other yourself. When I idiotically pointed at Almir's non-existent difference, I expelled myself from my raja.