Jovan Autonomašević > Jovan's Quotes

“But Milošević, like Rasputin, refused to die, even as Tony Blair continued his miraculous pilgrim’s progress in search of bigger beasts to bag.”
― John Farebrother, The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip

“Babe i žabe ('just say no to Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia and Islamic State!')”
― John Farebrother, The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip

“Books are the carriers of civilization...They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman

“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Medicinal rakija can be applied externally or internally for the relief of any ailment, physical or mental, including AIDS. According to Selimović, 'Rakija never did anyone any harm, as long as it’s taken as a medicine and not drunk like water' (it’s also good for cleaning glass and polishing furniture).”
― John Farebrother, The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip

“I lock my door upon myself - a poet had said.
I turn my key and there's -- happiness.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“The peculiar striations that define someone's personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.”
― Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“Destruction. Anyone who didn’t know the real meaning of that word now has the opportunity to learn it here. You might have thought that you already knew its real name and how to pronounce it. But during the first major bombardment you experience, you find himself in the semi-darkness of a cellar with a crowd of frantic people, already killed by fear. What such people do and the way they speak and behave is completely outside the framework of the accepted standards of behaviour that prevail at the time, and indeed has its origin in the other side of human consciousness. But all voices are silenced and all movements frozen by an explosion, or rather, a series of explosions, scattered somewhere around the city centre. And then, in the darkness and silence that reign after the explosions, the distant but clear crashing of multi-storey buildings can be heard, like an echo. It is an alarming, uncommon sound, akin to a series of consecutive stone avalanches, the voice of giant hordes, formed up beside each other, roaring their indecipherable and terrible cheers to someone riding swiftly ahead of them; their shouts overlap and merge as they tail off. This new sound that touches a place inside you hitherto unknown, is the true name of destruction and its proper pronunciation. Destruction’s strange voice takes wing, and seeks within the mass an individual it can frighten, and within each individual a weak point open to fear. And it finds it, at least here. Because anyone who as a result is frightened, is already beaten, regardless of all the possible convoluted developments of the war, and even its final outcome. Thus it happens that, in addition to the major destruction to visible things, even greater destruction is wrought within and between people, which only a few of them, and even then only gradually, begin to see and understand. The destruction tears off man’s final mask, turns his innards inside out and throws into view unexpected characteristics, contrary to everything known or thought about a person, and even what he believed about himself; it disrupts family relations and changes the established social order and relationships, even those considered eternal and unchanging, such as gender relations.”
― Ivo Andrić

“I long so much to make beautiful things. But beautiful things require effort and disappointment and perseverance.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“As in the NOZB, there were those in the 5th Corps who quickly realised that not only personal security but also wealth and power were to be found in the civilian and military power structures; but instead of 'Živio Babo!', this time the password to the alternative reality above the law was 'Allahu ekber!' ('God is supreme'; describing the situation in the Borders on the eve of the Peasants’ Revolt, Milan Božić’s son Stevo said: 'The police and other people in the authorities had everything. Guns, meat and rakija went together, while ordinary people were dying of hunger' ).”
― John Farebrother, The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip

“My senses, until now starved of any except visual stimuli, were suddenly assailed by a concentrated, if not distilled essence of the sounds and smells of Bosnian country life. Witty, earthy idioms, formidable oaths, and strains of turbofolk music combined with fresh farmyard fragrances to deliver a triple whammy.”
― John Farebrother, The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip

“As one refugee, Amila, from Gradačac, commented 20 years later: “The most important part of being a refugee is being a good loser; it’s the only way to survive this. You learn to lose your nationality, your home to strangers with bigger guns, your father to mental illness, one aunt to genocide, and another to nationalism and ignorance. You learn to lose your kids, friends, dreams, neighbours, loves, diplomas, careers, photo albums, home movies, schools, museums, histories, landmarks, limbs, teeth, eyesight, sense of safety, sanity, and your sense of belonging in the world”.”
― John Farebrother, The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip

“Venus smiles not in a house of tears”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

“In the tomb with the body and in Hades with the soul, in Paradise with the thief and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, wast Thou, O boundless Christ, filling all things.”
― Ben C. Blackwell, Paul and the Apocalyptic Imagination

“With skillful parries the pauperized Swabian, master of mobile operations, endeavored to counter the thrusts of Montgomery”
― Charles F. Marshall, Discovering the Rommel Murder