Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."

I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.

Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.

I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.

I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, "Oh, this is good," where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.

I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.

When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.

I started appreciating and valuing different things. Some things just became insufferable to me, and not just literature. I used to like horror movies and now I couldn't stand them.

Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.

Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.

If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.

An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.

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.

When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me—perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.

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.

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.

One person's garbage is another person's commodity.

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

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.