All My Friends Are Fictional’s Reviews > Shards > Status Update

“If something can be created out of nothing by the sheer utterance of sound that gives meaning to it, then the only difference between something and nothing is in the naming. By calling nothing something, nothing becomes something, but the truth remains that nothing really changes in the great scheme of things. The physical constitution of nothing/ something, if it can even be called that, remains the same.”

“But one thing about forcing a life into a story is that you become a character and when the story ends you do, too. I finished my story of escape and it finished me. There is no more narrative to conjure up and make it make sense and hide behind. Now there's just the mess of life.”

"Are you aware that your transit visa is expiring tonight at midnight?"
[…]
"Do you know that failure to leave Croatia tonight at midnight will result in your incarceration and deportation?"
[…]
In the blue-tinted darkness of my room, not being able to fall asleep […] I stared at the broken red numbers of the alarm clock, wondering how a simple thing like 11:59 turning into 12:00 could make a person illegal.

“The night fell on Edinburgh like a blanket over a birdcage and a haze crept into the air and made the lights crisp at the source but blurry on the periphery. The chill put bumps on your skin. Ghosts swirled around streetlights and tangled in your hair. Buildings breathed heavily. […] You could feel how old everything was despite the neon, the cars, and the techno music bumping from basement bars.”

„I could say that the reason he let us go to Scotland was […] that he realized we really deserved to show the world that there was beauty in Bosnia, and heart, and love, and that we weren't just victims of madmen, experts at suffering, beggars crying for help, vegetating in our towns and waiting to be picked off while the world watched it on CNN. I could say that, but it wouldn't be the truth.“

„Memories are nothing like tapes. Tapes record reality.
Minds record fiction. My mind was never one for remembering things right. Too much fantasy. Too much muggy past. Too many daydreams. Plus, the present reality, with all its tedious details, is just way too complicated […]. Who can keep track of it all when our eyes are open so wide and when seconds are so short and cheap and when we spend them so easily?“

„…Yugoslavian brand of Communism. Take architects, for example. Say a public building is to be made. In Communism it's not the best architect who gets to make the building; it's the guy (almost always a man) with seniority in the Party who happens to be an architect that gets to make the building. […] By then you're 98 percent bureaucrat and 2 percent architect.“

„After the war a new country was born, bloody all over and enveloped in a new ideological placenta. Its people, divided by faith before, were now forced to unite in godlessness. God was beaten, threatened, blackmailed, tricked, and lured out of the starving populace by the new regime. It was the worst time in the world to be an imam.“