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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.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Pain
Sell
Intestines
Much
Sells
Spotted
Red
Bolt
Sadness
Bolts
Realized
Label
Whose
Corner
Went
Labels
Read
Corners
Sardines

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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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.
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Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
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Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
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I did not intend to stay I had no experience in the United States - I may have been here less than 24 hours - but I knew I would never get inside there. And 'there' not being America necessarily, but that harmonious mode of living that some people are lucky enough to have in this country.
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To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.
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I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
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Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.
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There are many things I think about that never get to the point of becoming serious. In other words, I try to talk myself out of writing, sometimes for many years, and when I run out of arguments, I write.
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I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.
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I think about the story while I think about other things. This is an important part of the process: I look at it sideways. If I look straight at it, it produces nothing other than what seem like complicated, brilliant designs that fall apart the following morning. In some way stories mature when you're not looking.
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As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
Aleksandar Hemon
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God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?
Aleksandar Hemon
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We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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
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I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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.
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I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
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I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
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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.
Aleksandar Hemon