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

One person's garbage is another person's commodity.

— 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

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

Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity.

— Aleksandar Hemon

Tell the fucking story.

— Aleksandar Hemon

-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Tea-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

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

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

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