“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.”
Aleksandar Hemon“I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.”
Aleksandar Hemon“I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.”
Aleksandar Hemon“I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.”
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.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives“I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives“-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. S”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives“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.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project“Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives“Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--is a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We process the world by telling stories and produce human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives“One person's garbage is another person's commodity.”
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project