I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“We are never as beautiful as now. The crushing sadness of hotel rooms; the gelid lights and clean notepads; the blank walls… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“You have to create a form from the life that exists, not the other way around. If it comes out in these… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“So you are Catholic? Didn't know that. I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“I know as well as anybody how hard it is to live after a grave loss. But life needs to go on,… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“We are within our life and we stay there for as long as possible, that's our home. We need life. There is… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“If there are more dead than living, then the world is about death, and the question is: What are we to do… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
One builds one's life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“What is life? This is no life. Who wants this life? The dead leave it to us to struggle in this world.… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life,… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“Let me tell you a joke, Rora said. Mujo wakes up one day, after a long night of drinking, and asks himself… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“People here snarl and frown a lot, he wrote; he had seen neither a smile nor the sun in months. What is… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability — the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“If you find yourself asking: How did I get here? Isador once said, that probably means you are living a life worth… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“I think it is about life. I think there is always more life than death. Those who lived are always alive for… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I've never meditated for a moment in my life. I don't know how it works. But one of the things you have… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“My dreams were but a means of forgetting, they were the branches tied to the galloping horses of our days, the emptying… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“She could slip out of her shoes and leave them right here, stuck in the muck, and then get rid of her… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“What you see is what you see, but that is never everything. Sarajavo is Sarajevo whatever you see or don't see. America… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
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… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
“The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically - and that to me is a privilege, to… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create. — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not,… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the… — Aleksandar Hemon Copy Share Image
