Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

I don't want to take photographs that I won't recognize as myself, and myself isn't necessarily just blankly staring at the lens.

I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.

God is not interested in what you think you should be or feel. He is not interested in the narrative you have construct for yourself, or that others have construct for you. He may even use suffering to deconstruct that narrative.

We ask everybody to help us to change the world, but we are not talking about our planet Earth; we are talking about the world that each one of us creates within our mind. We are talking about the story that we create.

A person likes to think of himself in a certain way, and when something happens that makes that no longer possible, you mourn the old self. The person you thought you were.

My good friend once said, "You guys think you're the stars in your own movie."

We are, each of us, our own prisoner. We are locked up in our own story.

He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.

Recognize that whether you are worthy or not is all a made-up 'story'...Nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it...There's no one who comes around and stamps you 'worthy' or 'unworthy'. You do that. You make it up. You decide it...If you say you're worthy, you are. If you say you're not worthy, you're not. Either way you will live into your story.

We have so many ideas and beliefs about ourselves. We told ourselves story about what we want and who we are, smart or kind. Often these are the unexamined and limited ideas of others that we have internalized and then gone on to life out.

It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.

Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another.

Every time I change the way I explain myself to myself, I have to rearrange the story of my life.

You are the effect of your story, that's all.

There's this kind of strange mythology about me in the media because I've done unusual things.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

You're the hero of your own story. So it's interesting for historical revisionism to happen. I had let go of my own story from my own childhood and whatever anger I had and I began to see it from a very different place. It's really easy to be like "This thing happened to me! Look what they did to me or are doing to me." These are such powerful ideas and it's so easy to hold onto them forever.

Every man is the hero of his own song.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

"Margaret" was just my truth. It was what I knew to be true about sixth grade.

I was an uncommonly unattractive young man.

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices they would call "hard but necessary" for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.

My history defines who I am.

There are people who can write their memoirs with a reasonable amount of honesty, and there are people who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough. I think I might be the first to admit that the sort of reticence which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality is really an inverted sort of egotism.