Quotes by Bosnian Authors

Who lies for you will lie against you.
Bosnian Proverb
What is it with boys? How do they slide into fucked-upness so quickly, with such natural ease?
Aleksandar Hemon
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
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
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
-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
They ask me what is madness and I reply it is a gift.They ask me why, and I said:The world trough the eyes of normal people is boring, but look at it trough the eyes of the mad, then you will know why I enjoy my madness so much!
Seid Šabanović
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
Isabel’s indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.
Aleksandar Hemon
Dualism is the closest human feeling, but it is not necessarily the highest human philosophy. On the contrary, all great philosophies have been monistic. Man experiences the world dualistically, but monism is the essence of all human thinking. Philosophy disagrees with dualism. However, this fact does not mean too much, because life, being superior to thought, may not be judged by it. In reality, since we are human beings, we are living two realities. We can deny these two worlds, but we cannot escape from them. Life does not depend too much on our understanding of it.
Alija Izetbegović
There are only three integral views of the world: the religious, the materialistic, and the Islamic. They reflect three elemental possibilities (conscience, nature, and man), each of them manifesting itself as Christianity, materialism, and Islam. All variety of ideologies, philosophies, and teachings from the oldest time up to now can be reduced to one of these three basic world views. The first takes as its starting point the existence of the spirit, the second the existence of matter, and the third the simultaneous existence of spirit and matter. If only matter exists, materialism would be the only consequent philosophy. On the contrary, if the spirit exists then man also exists, and man's life would be senseless without a kind of religion and morality. Islam is the name for the unity of spirit and matter, the highest form of which is man himself. The human life is complete only if it includes both the physical and the spiritual desires of the human being. All man's failures are either because of the religious denial of man's biological needs of the materialistic denial of man's spiritual desires.
Alija Izetbegović
All the dilemmas and questions of today were known in ethics more than 2,000 years ago. All the greatest teachers of mankind whether prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad or non-prophets such as Confucius , Gautama, Buddha, Socrates, Kant, Tolstoy , and Martin Buber, covering a period from the sixth century BC up to the present ( Martin Buber died in 1965) have taught essentially the same morals. As distinguished from rules about social orders and ways of production , moral truths are constant. The reason for this lies in the fact that the riddle had been established at the moment of creation in the "prologue in heaven" in the act preceding the whole of human history. Intelligence, education, and experience do not in themselves help us approach or better understand all of that. Jesus pronounced his truth when he was a child and was slightly more than thirty when he was condemned. He needed neither knowledge nor experience for his great, capital truths about God and man because these truths could not be reached by knowledge or experience. Are they not "Hidden from the wise and the learned and revealed to the little ?
Alija Izetbegović
We have no rational evidence that there exits another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume.
Alija Izetbegović
Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections.
Alija Izetbegović
Islam's middle position can be recognized by the fact that Islam has always been attacked from the two opposite directions: from the side of religion, that is too natural, actual, and tuned to the world; and from the side of science that it contains religious and mystical elements. There is only one Islam, but like man, it has both soul and body.
Alija Izetbegović
It is known that the Quran leaves an analytical reader the impression of disarrangement, and that it seems to be a compound of diverse elements. Nevertheless, the Quran is life, not literature. Islam is a way of living rather than a way of thinking. The only authentic comment of the Quran can be life, and as we know, it was the life of the prophet Muhammad. Islam is in its written form (the Quran) may seem disorderly, but in the life of Muhammad it proves itself to be a natural union of love and force, the sublime and the real, the divine and the human. This explosive compound of religion and politics produced enormous force in the life of the peoples who accepted it. In one moment, Islam has coincided with the very essence of life.
Alija Izetbegović
Scientists or thinkers who try to discover the truth cannot find that higher life by thinking alone, but their own life, spent in search for the truth and neglecting the physical living, is just that higher form of human existence.
Alija Izetbegović
In some socialist states well-performed work is rewarded with moral stimulants instead of material ones. However, the moral stimulants cannot be explained by materialistic philosophy. It is the same case with the appeals for humanism, justice, equality, freedom, human rights, and so forth, which are all of religious origin. Certainly, everybody has the right to live as he thinks best, including the right not to be consistent with his own pattern. Still, to understand the world correctly, it is important to know the true origin of meaning and of the ideas ruling the world.
Alija Izetbegović
We have no rational evidence that there exist another world, but we have a clear feeling that man does not exist only to produce and to consume. Scientists or thinkers who try to discover the truth cannot find that higher life by thinking alone, but their own life, spent in search for the truth and neglecting the physical living, is just that higher form of human existence.
Alija Izetbegović
The mystics have always stressed the religious aspect of Islam, the rationalists the other one. All the same, both of them have always had difficulties with Islam, simply because it cannot be put into any of their classifications. Take wudu as an example. A mystic will define it as a religious ablution with symbolic meaning. A rationalist will look upon it as a matter of hygiene only. They are both right, but only partly. The defectiveness of the mystic explanation lies in the fact that it lets the hygienic side of wudu become a mere form. Following the same logic in other questions, this approach will reduce Islam to pure religion, by eliminating all physical, intellectual, and social components from it. The rationalists take quite the opposite way. By neglecting the religious side, they degrade Islam to a political movement only, creating a new type of nationalism from it, a so called Islamic nationalism, deprived of ethical-religious substance, empty and equal to all other nationalisms in this regard. To be a Muslim in this case, does not represent an appeal or a duty, a moral or a religious obligation, or any attitude to the universal truth. It means only belonging to a group different from the other one. Islam has never been only a nation. Rather, Islam is a call to a nation, " to enjoin the right and to forbid the wrong" Quran- that is, to perform a moral mission. If we disregard the political component of Islam and accept religious mysticism , we silently admit dependence and slavery. On the contrary, if we ignore the religious component , we cease to be any moral force.
Alija Izetbegović
Marxism rejected the family and the state, but in practice it kept these institutions. Every pure religion disapproved of man's worrying about this world, but as the ideology of living people, it accepted the struggle for social justice and a better world. Marxism has had to accept some degree of individual freedom and religion some use of force. It is obvious in real life that man cannot live according to a consistent philosophy.
Alija Izetbegović
The question is whether they can find a way out and remain what they are. To adapt themselves to real life, they borrow from each other. Christianity , which has become a church, began to talk about work, wealth, power, education, science, marriage, laws, social justice, and so forth. And materialism , on the other hand, which became socialism or an order, a state, speaks about humanism , morality, art, creation, justice, responsibility, freedom and so forth.
Alija Izetbegović
Tell the fucking story.
Aleksandar Hemon
One person's garbage is another person's commodity.
Aleksandar Hemon
So you are Catholic? Didn't know that.I am nothing, I said. God knows God is no friend of mine. But I envy people who believe in this crap. They don't worry about the meaning of life and things, whereas I do.
Aleksandar Hemon
The silence leans forward.
Saša Stanišić
-not only did he deplore the waste of words, he detested the moral lassitude with which they were wasted. To him, in whose throat the bone of displacement was forever stuck, it was wrong to talk about nothing when there was a perpetual shortage of words for all the horrible things that happened in the world. It was better to be silent than to say what didn't matter.
Aleksandar Hemon
Who lies for you will lie against you.
Bosnian Proverb
I told her I hated normal people and the land of the fucking free and the home of the asshole brave, and I hated God and George and all and everything.
Aleksandar Hemon
The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
500. There are paradoxes. If there were no night, we would be deprived of themagnificent image of a starry sky. Thus light deprives us of "vision," anddarkness helps us "see.
Alija Izetbegović
He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.
Aleksandar Hemon
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
One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.
Aleksandar Hemon
Only those who do not care, only those who find a way to diminish or extinguish the value of other human beings, survive wars without damage and speak of warrior honor afterward.
Aleksandar Hemon
If I were a magician who could make things possible, then pictures could talk while we painted them. If I were a magaician who could make things possible, then houses could keep their promises. And they would have to promise not to lose their roofs or go up in flames. If I were a magician who could make things possible, the scars made in them by bullet holes would close up again over the years.
Saša Stanišić
...someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings.
Saša Stanišić
We should kill our pasts with each passing day. Blot them out, so that they will not hurt. Each present day could thus be endured more easily, it would not be measured against what no longer exists. As things our, spectres mix with our lives so that there is neither pure memory nor pure life. They clash and try to strangle each other, continually.
Meša Selimović
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
A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war. With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.
Semezdin Mehmedinović
Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.
Aleksandar Hemon
People quickly forget evil because they still haven't created a language to describe it so the world refuses to carry the burden, preferring to forget.
Semezdin Mehmedinović
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.
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
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.
Aleksandar Hemon
If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.
Aleksandar Hemon
When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.
Aleksandar Hemon
Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.
Meša Selimović
Still, I never heard him say that he hated or wanted to hurt or kill someone for all the horrific things that had been happening to him and his family.
Savo Heleta
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
If you do not have the strength to forgive,then compel themselves and continue in that, do not write bad words.For all that you write, is your own burden, you're gonna wear.So just write nice!
Sanel Alić
If the international community is not ready to defend the principles which it itself has proclaimed as its foundations, let it say so openly, both to the people of Bosnia and to the people of the world. Let it proclaim a new code of behavior in which force will be the first and the last argument.
Alija Izetbegović
For 1,300 days of Sarajevo's drama, important people in the world who were supposed to act kept their eyes closed, ... But not you. You were not silent. Your voice was clear.
Alijia Izetbegovic
It (politician) wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all - the pencil of war, which spells only misery and death.
Zlata Filipović
My mom and dad refused to believe that people who had grown up together in peace and friendship, had gone to the same schools, spoken the same language, and listened to the same music, could overnight be blinded by ethnic hatred and start to brutally kill one another. They simply didn't accept as true that less than two years of a multiparty system and competition for power could poison people's brains so much.
Savo Heleta
Men are not gentle and graceful beings solely oriented towards good. They are physical, coarse, contradictory, stretched between desires and temptations. In an unnatural wish to make them sinless and infallible, we suddenly realize that we have obtained bloodless, sentimental and false personalities incapable of both good and evil. Separating them from mother Earth, we separate them from life, and where is no life, there is no virtue either.
Alija Izetbegović
Science gives an exact photograph of the world, but it lacks an essential dimension of reality.
Alija Izetbegović