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.

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.

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.

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.

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 common platitudes we heard was that __ords failed._ But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language__he comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn__ want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn__ want to know what we did; we didn__ want to know it either.

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

The cafeteria in the Chicago__ Children__ Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world__nd forever it shall be__ith 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.

we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.

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

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

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

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

Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.

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.

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.

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.

Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.