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

Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.

— Aleksandar Hemon

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

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

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

— Aleksandar Hemon

I cannot stand that whole game of confession, that is: Here I have sinned, now I'm confessing my sins, and describing my path of sin and then in the act of confession I beg for your forgiveness and redemption.

— Aleksandar Hemon

If my mind and my city were the same thing then I was losing my mind.

— Aleksandar Hemon

I gradually became aware that my inferiority was inseparable from my exteriorize, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

— Aleksandar Hemon

I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.

— Aleksandar Hemon

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