You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

What you demand from storytelling is a moral – even political – import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.

— Aleksandar Hemon

I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiatet the conditions of your selfhood under pereptually changing existential circumstances.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Right now, it didn’t look good, the life. What doesn’t kill you makes you horny.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty – the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips – once it’s smoked it cannot be unsmoked.

— Aleksandar Hemon

There are people who just live and there are people who just survive,” Bega had said. “Americans live, we survive.

— Aleksandar Hemon

The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy.

— Aleksandar Hemon

George W. Bush spoke to the camera, his face so decisively earnest that it was clear he was lying, his button eyes lit up with amateurish subterfuge. Only truly great men can be adept at shameless lying, Joshua thought. This dude was straining to the point of snapping.

— Aleksandar Hemon

All the players looked absurdly inept, as though they were expressly drafted to be humiliated, entrepreneurs in the industry of losing.

— Aleksandar Hemon

What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?

— Aleksandar Hemon

But nothing has ever been – nor will it ever be – the way it used to be.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Perhaps if they all remained silent for as long as possible, they’d slip out of this moment into the next one, and then the next one, until all the preceding moments were erased from memory and everything could start all over again. The ultimate American dream: the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now.

— Aleksandar Hemon

You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Don’t you wonder sometimes,” sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, “about sound and vision?

— Aleksandar Hemon

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.

— Aleksandar Hemon

If someone imagines that someone loves him, and does not believe he has given any cause for it, he should love in return.

— Aleksandar Hemon
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