The collection / 39 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1964 AD

One person's garbage is another person's commodity.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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02c. 1964 AD

Tell the fucking story.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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03c. 1964 AD

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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04c. 1964 AD

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 / quote

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05c. 1964 AD

Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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06c. 1964 AD

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 / quote

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07c. 1964 AD

-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. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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08c. 1964 AD

It was a great fucking time, the short era of disaster euphoria, for nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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09c. 1964 AD

I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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10c. 1964 AD

He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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11c. 1964 AD

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 / quote

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12c. 1964 AD

What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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13c. 1964 AD

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 / quote

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14c. 1964 AD

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 / quote

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15c. 1964 AD

I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.

Aleksandar Hemon / quote

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