Pajtim Statovci > Quotes

“Anyone can change the direction of his life, any time at all, if only he has enough motivation: that was the moral of the story. The cat found it easier to believe this than to think about what it actually meant: that the word anyone actually referred to a very small group of people, that time has no direction, and that motivation is rarely the salient difference between people.”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia

“It didn’t matter where we ended up, I thought then, because every place I had ever been with him had been a home.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“Jokaisen ihmisen pitäisi vähintään kerran elämässään jäädä ilman vaihtoehtoja, niin minä ajattelen, koska silloin sitä luulee tulevansa hulluksi. Vaan nyt minä tiedän, ettei se ole lainkaan vaarallista.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Kissani Jugoslavia

“One raised with fear never learns to live without it. When you take away its cause, fear manifests, becoming its own consequences – a lingering suspicion, hallucinations and waking dreams.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“like Do you realize how narrow-minded it is to think that there are only two genders in the world, two types of people, men and women?”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“If death were a sensation, it would be this: invisibility, living your life in ill-fitting clothes, walking in shoes that pinch.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“Taikka sitten saatan kuvitella että sinä tulet taloon enkä minä huomaa sinua, tunnen vain kun tartut minuun takaapäin ja hengityksesi kiristää niskani kananlihalle, ja sitten minä käännyn ja siinä sinä olet, tukevana kuin kivipylväs ja niin uskomattoman kauniina, kuin kesän tulvana talven sydämessä, lasipintaisena järvenä aavikon keskellä, jonakin juuri niin loistavana ja merkillisenä ettei sitä ole mahdollista pukea sanoiksi.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“Luin joskus jostain, että unelmien toteutumisella on varjopuolensa, sillä elettyään unelmansa todeksi uneksija on antanut toiveensa pois. Se teki minut mietteliääksi, hieman surulliseksikin, sillä ajattelin, että ihmisen pitäisi jotenkin varoa unelmiaan, niiden toteutumista erityisesti. Jos uneksinnan arvo on uneksijan haaveilussa, minkä arvoinen voi toteutunut haave olla? Minkä arvoinen voi olla esimerkiksi kirja, jos se julki tullessaan on kirjoittajansa pois antama unelma?”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“It's the first thing people notice,' she says despondently. 'Difference. As if it's a crime.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Tiranan sydän

“Tämä on elämäni täydellisin päivä, ajattelen, ja sinä iltana tuntemamme ilo, tiedämme niin molemmat, tunne kun suutelen hänen niskaansa, ihminen joka olen haistaessani hänen hiuksiaan, katseet jotka toisiimme luomme, parvekkeen pöydälle lasketun oluen maku, se miten huulemme koskettavat toisiaan sillä hetkellä, sammuvan illan liekissä, se ei pääty koskaan vaikka mikään siitä ei ole läsnä enää huomenna.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“Isn’t it strange how – again and again, as if to humiliate themselves – people fool themselves into thinking they can get time back somehow? How time only becomes important once it has passed?”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“I wouldn’t yet realize that all human activity is motivated by the desire to be better. People move from one country to the next to secure better living conditions, and nothing is said or done unselfishly, every action entails the promise of a greater tomorrow, the wish that I’ll get something I want, something I think I can’t live without.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“Sai quando si dice che devi amare te stesso prima di poter amare un altro, nutrire prima te stesso e poi gli altri,
aiutare te stesso e poi gli altri
che tipo di persona ha il coraggio di dire questo, chi ha le palle per dire parole del genere
che gli indifesi, gli affamati e i trascurati non meritano
sostegno, cibo, amore?
E se poi si è incapaci di amare se stessi, allora che succede?”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“Menen hetkeksi istumaan kirkon etuosaan, kaivan laukusta uuden ristikoruni ja ripustan sen kaulalleni, ja kun muuan pappi tervehtii minua nyökkäämällä suuntaani mitä hienovaraisimmalla eleellä, joka on kuin lyhyt siveltimenveto, minusta tuntuu että ymmärrän Suomesta jotakin keskeistä: ihmiset eivä tole epäkohteliaita vaan yksinäisiä, ja he pitävät siitä, että saavat olla rauhassa omissa oloissaan, eivätkä he tarvitse ympärilleen mitään ylimääräistä, eivät pilvenpiirtäjien tuomaa ylellisyyttä tai koristeellisten palatsien hohtoa.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Tiranan sydän

“Sanoissaan kirjailija saa jatkaa elämäänsä kunnianarvoisimmalla mahdollisella tavalla. Lukiessani varta vasten minulle hankittuja kirjoja en voi kuin päivitellä kuluneina vuosina hukkaan heittämääni aikaa, sitä miten vähän olenkaan saanut luettua siihen nähden, miten suuresti lukemisesta nautin.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“Try to teach them something, but they’ll never learn. Give them a job and they’ll steal your money. Give them an apartment and they’ll trash it, though they don’t even have to pay for it themselves,” said the cat sternly. “Good God,”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia

“Immigrants have to grow a thick skin if they want to do something more than wait hand and foot on the Finns, my father used to say. Go ahead, do as they do. Ruin your life by being like them, but one day you’ll see that if you try to become their equal, they’ll despise you all the more, and then you’ll end up hating yourself. Don’t give them the satisfaction.”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia

“Loneliness peels you out of your skin, cuts out your tongue, and abandons you in a stale, locked room to slowly evaporate.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“Tai kuvittelen että sinä luet kirjaa sohvalla, yhtä keskittyneesti kuin aina, etkä edes kuule kun sanon jotakin aivan arkipäiväistä, montako munaa syöt tai mitä jos vaihtaisin lakanat tänään, et kuule minua ja minusta se on hurmaavaa, sinä ja sinun kirjasi.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“...when people don't like you, you don't like yourself either, that's the way it goes, you learn to give certain answers to certain questions because that's the answer the person asking the question wants to hear, and before long you are inevitably caught up in a web of lies, lies that people are forced into telling because the truth doesn't make an impression, because the truth always fails, because it's never good enough.

What can you do if your story, which is so tragic that you imagine it will awaken people's sympathy, instead elicits hatred and violence?”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“Nothing lasts forever, he said at the dinner table. The beauty of our life is that it ends, that is how it is meant to be, the old make way for the young and for all the children yet to be born, who will make the world a better place,”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“I can choose what I am, I can choose my gender, choose my nationality and my name, my place of birth, all simply by opening my mouth. Nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“It is early April, and I desire another man so unmistakably that for the rest of the day he is with me in my prayers, in which I shamelessly ask god to give him to me.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Bolla

“There was no use wasting time daydreaming if you were too close to your own dreams, because there was a greater likelihood that those dreams would come true, and then you’d have to accept that making those dreams come true wasn’t quite everything you’d imagined. And that—the disappointment, the anger, the bitterness and greed—that was a fate far worse than never making your dreams come true at all. A man should always strive for something he can never achieve, my father used to say.”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia

“This life is worth nothing at all; only the next life is worth something.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“you are nothing without money here. Without money there is no access to education or health care, and if you look like you don’t have money you won’t get service either.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“As time passed I realized that I no longer considered myself special or unique, and this is perhaps the worst thing that can happen, for this if anything will make a person passionless, this if anything forces one to believe in God. You clutch the branches you can reach, and settle for your destiny. Only then will you see the light, the fact that the lack of rights and opportunities very rarely leads someone to the fight for them.”
― Pajtim Statovci, Crossing

“she told the girl that in some places it was customary for the groom to bring the cat to his newly wed bride on their wedding night and kill it with his bare hands to demonstrate to his wife his supremacy, to teach her to fear him.”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia

“When I realized the only reason I went to school in the first place was because an illiterate woman had no chance of marrying a decent husband,”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia

“My father used to say there was no evil in the world in the form in which we imagine evil to exist. As he watched news of the unfolding conflict in Kosovo he said we should come up with another word for evil, and that name should be laziness.”
― Pajtim Statovci, My Cat Yugoslavia