Aleksandar Hemon

Writer

1964-09-09

Aleksandar Hemon is a Bosnian-American writer known for fiction and essays written in English after emigrating to the United States. His books include The Lazarus Project and The Making of Zombie Wars. His work often explores displacement, memory, and identity.

Books by Aleksandar Hemon

The Lazarus Project
View on Amazon
The Question of Bruno
View on Amazon
World and All That It Holds
View on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Quotes by Aleksandar Hemon

we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.
Read quote
The cafeteria in the Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital basement was the saddest place in the world— and forever it shall be— with its grim neon lights and gray tabletops and the diffuse foreboding of those who stepped away from suffering children to have a grilled cheese sandwich.
Read quote
While he wanted to teach me what he knew, I wanted him to see what it all looked like for me— perhaps love is a process of finding a common vision of reality.
Read quote
If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.
Read quote
When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.
Read quote
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
Read quote
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Read quote
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Read quote
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
Read quote
we wept within the moment that was dividing our life into before and after, whereby the before was forever foreclosed, while the after was spreading out, like an exploding twinkle-star, into a dark universe of pain.
Read quote