Quote

One builds one's life in consistency one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one's distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.

Aleksandar Hemon

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Aleksandar Hemon
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: September 9
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
City of Sarajevo
Even
Doomed
Always
Seeds
Unsupported
Life
Recognize
Invests
Flower
Bloomed
However
Builds
Belief
Consistency
Reality
Distant
Past
Seed

More quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

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For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).
Aleksandar Hemon
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Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
Aleksandar Hemon
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It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life.
Aleksandar Hemon
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We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.
Aleksandar Hemon
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You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I had an epiphany: I was a loser.
Aleksandar Hemon
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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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.
Aleksandar Hemon
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If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
Aleksandar Hemon
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In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction there's no word describing that.
Aleksandar Hemon
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I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that's the center.
Aleksandar Hemon
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There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.
Aleksandar Hemon
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The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.
Aleksandar Hemon
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If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon
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You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
Aleksandar Hemon
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Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.
Aleksandar Hemon