Aleksandar Hemon > Quotes

“Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“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, The Lazarus Project

“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, The Lazarus Project

“I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared,
and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man

“Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“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. ”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“Home is where somebody notices your absence.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“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

“Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“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

“Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

“If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.”
― Aleksandar Hemon

“One of the most common platitudes we heard was that “words failed.” But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language—the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn’t want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn’t want to know what we did; we didn’t want to know it either.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

“I will never know you, nothing about you, what has died inside you, what has lived invisibly. I am elsewhere now.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being.”
― Aleksandar Hemon

“We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

“While customarily splling coffee grounds all over the counter, 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, The Lazarus Project

“The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

“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 , The Book of My Lives

“Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project