Shopping for a Better Country Quotes

“The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Describing men, of course, I run into the same problems—aquiline nose, chiseled features, bullish neck, leonine hair, steely gaze, bronze tan—but somehow the arsenal of clichés and materials for describing men seems smaller. Many feminists are right to claim that the male is on the whole less objectified than the female; the male is treated more frequently as the subject rather than the object.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“How to describe the woman? Silky hair, velvety lips. No, it won’t do, I’m using fabrics, constructing a doll. How about coppery hair, or golden locks of hair, or platinum blonde? No, now I’m doing some kind of industrial metallurgy with precious metals; in addition to everything else, the woman sounds like a commodity. And what’s “locks of hair” supposed to mean? Lock, some kind of bondage? No, strike it out. Ruby lips, pearly white teeth, brilliant smile. No, now I’m making the woman out of precious stones, and out of clichés. Almond-shaped eyes, hazel-colored eyes, pear-shaped waist, apple-red cheeks, lips like the bud of a moist flower, peachy fuzz on her upper lip. Now I’m making up a woman out of fruits, plants. She strode like a gazelle. Her snaky waist coiled and uncoiled. Now I’m demeaning the woman, making her into an animal. On the other hand, you can call a woman a goddess. Aphrodite, Venus, or at least a demi-god, angelic beauty. But these terms were all invariably overused, clichés. In addition, if you call a woman Aphrodite, it might seem like an oblique way of saying that the woman is overweight.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“The destruction of Dresden was an overkill. It was done in February, 1945, when it was clear that Germany would lose the war. Russians could have already swept across the country but they waited for some reason. Firebombing mostly old people and children and women, hardly any of them culprits in the war, wasn’t the most ethical thing to do, but it was done, and now, watching the restoration of the cathedral, which takes place for years and takes millions of dollars, it is clear how much easier destruction is than construction.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“In the train, I read a special issue of Der Spiegel, about the Germans who had been driven out in ethnic cleansing campaigns at the end of World War One. Almost three million from Sudetenland. The Czechs, who offered hardly any resistance to the Germans, celebrated the victory given them by Russians in such a manner. Poland, Yugoslavia, Germans were driven out of these countries, mass executed. The story is not given much attention because people are put in the mass category—Germans, the perpetrators, not the victims. Well, are they all the same? Did they all vote the same way? Those in other countries didn’t vote at all, and their sympathies may have been largely with the invading armies, but it is not these Germans who decided anything or started anything. If the US were suddenly to lose a war that Bush initiates, should all the Americans be driven out from everywhere, be mass executed, all on account of being Americans, even if Bush didn’t win the presidency with a majority vote? Hitler, likewise, never got the majority, but worked with coalitions. If one is not to romanticize, and permanently divide nations into the good ones and the bad ones, and thus perpetrate chauvinism, all these stories have to be told.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When fatness was an exception, it was part of the canon of beauty. Now that leanness is an exception, its symptoms are canonized.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Enemies keep you alert, competitive, and friendships lull you into mediocrity, and through peer pressure, keep you back and down, and eventually, down and out. Some of the most excellent friends I knew in my hometown became alcoholics, and true enough, they are fun to talk with, telling jokes and anecdotes, but they sacrificed their lives to their friendships, proving that they were fun, that they were not betraying friends by leaving hometown for large cities and countries and professions.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“My friend gave me an opportunity to be bad, that is, free.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I was caught between the crossfire of the atheist school and a Baptist church and family. Both had a prescription for how I was supposed to think and behave. On most points, they actually agreed. I was supposed to be clean, have short hair, talk modestly, listen and obey, never fight. Consequently, I was slovenly, grew long hair, and fought every day.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Countries change, of course, and it is still the same country, in a way, resembling a McCarthy America, except that McCarthy’s America was not in debt. This is a bankrupt America, bankrupted partly by its suspicions and overspending on the military and over-reliance on consumerism.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When I talk on the phone with my brother Ivo, who is a theology instructor at Baylor, he invariably wants to talk politics, and I hear clicking in the background, and I say, Why talk politics, just remember where we are! I used to have that experience with my older brother Vlado in Yugoslavia: I would want to expound my political views, but he would point to the phone, and say, Why talk politics, remember where we are. This is not America. How things have changed! Now I tell my brother Ivo, Remember where we are. This is not Croatia! Now I am tempted to say, Remember where we are. This is not America. We as Americans are being exiled from our country of liberty through the general paranoia being injected into our asses. The total spying which we suspected in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany, is only now possible, in the States, through credit cards, computers, EZ passes, surveillance cameras, and well-meaning neighbors.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Strangely enough, I am beginning to feel like an exile when I go to a polling station in PA and people hold placards approving attacking Middle Eastern countries, supporting the troops. Imagine if in Nazi Germany people said, Look, we know the war is wrong, but we love our boys and we support them. It’s the wrong time to withhold our support now that they are struggling for German ideals, defending Auschwitz. The comparison is extreme, but why support the troops in an unsupportable war?”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I was taught not to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism; the word patriotism was an attempt to present the same ugly nationalist phenomenon of favoring your country over others; patriotism was a patriarchal swindle that made it easy to recruit soldiers to shed the blood of other peoples.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“This was his third attempt to escape Yugoslavia, for which he was rewarded by two years of treatment in the insane asylum. The official political reasoning was simple: if you wanted to leave a healthy society like socialist Yugoslavia to live in the decadent West, you were insane.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Late at night, my friend Boris and I stood by the tracks and the train passed with orange lights in all its windows but not a single passenger head to be seen. Where are the passengers? I asked. The train is empty? Oh, they are there, you just don’t see them. They’re on the floor. There used to be snipers all along the tracks and so there are stretches of the rails where people all lie down on the floor so they won’t be shot.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“It was clear that people were not rushing to the shelves. In fact, I’d never seen anybody in a library pick up a small literary journal.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I became sensitive, or at least hypocritical.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Quite a few people are here to study the European Union. Perhaps there is such a thing as the European Union. When I am on the bus, I don’t see or feel any union. I see all sorts of things, but that sort of big newspaper-headlines knowledge is not with me, nor do I want it to shape the phenomenology of the place.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Quite a few people are here to study the European Union. Perhaps there is such a thing as the European Union.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“They had talked about how to lose weight. One was telling another that she ought to eat nothing but protein— meats, tofu, eggs—and salads. And for it to work, she needed to have a nutrition guru. They were equally overweight, and this was clearly theoretical rather than practical knowledge.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I took a walk from Friedrichstrasse Station. That appears to be the train station from which I left in 1983 and in 1988. Then, it was a threatening place, with policemen carrying machine guns and parading around with dogs. Today I walked out to a commercial paradise of stores and of—policemen with machine guns and German shepherds. In fact, there were more police now than then.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“I remember, in former East Berlin, how startling it was to see the wall cut some streets. The street would go straight into the wall. It would continue on the other side, in another world. At least one street should have remained like that, walled, to remind people of the old division.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Serbs don’t forget, as the graffito goes, the atrocities that the Croatian ustashas committed against them in World War II. That was repeated in school over and over by history teachers when I was a pupil in Croatia. Many Croats don’t forget the slaughters that the Serb nationalist chetniks committed on the Croatian rural population, although that lesson was passed over in silence in our history lessons. My brother-in-law—who died of stomach cancer, and who had spent the recent war two hundred yards away from the Serb border toward Vukovar, from where his street was shelled almost daily—told me that when he was a child, during World War II, he ran into a ditch full of Croatian peasants massacred by chetniks. He never forgot, and wasn’t even allowed to talk about it because he would be jailed for spreading nationalist propaganda. He told me this in the park after my father’s funeral, at a moment when we were both talking about life, death, and souls. Which is better, to forget or to remember? Of course, to remember, but not to abuse the memories as Serbian leaders have done to spur their armies into aggression against Croats and Muslims. Croats will remember Vukovar. Muslims will remember Srebrenica. And what is the lesson? Not to trust thy neighbor? But that’s perhaps where the trouble began and will resume.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Love of ruins for an architect, he claimed, was quite natural, at least after a long career.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When he moved to another end of our town, our friendship diminished, and I made other friends. I moved to the States, and he stayed home. During the Serbo-Croatian war, he became a Serbian soldier, and I heard reports that he participated in the bombing of our hometown. That friendship seems to be ruined; it is hard to forgive something like that—anyhow, it will take a couple of decades perhaps. On the other hand, maybe the rumor is not true. And maybe I made his childhood bitter, who knows; maybe it was partly because of me that he resented the town.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Diogenes heard a young man playing on the lute. The otherwise stoical philosopher seemed to be touched by the emotional music and he fought tears. And then, when the young man played a quick and brilliant sequence of sounds, involving very complex fingering, Diogenes burst into tears. Why are you weeping, Master? At first I thought the man spent months acquiring his skill, he answered. Now I realize it’s years. I am weeping for his wasted years. The more he plays, the more evidence he supplies about how much time and talent he has wasted.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“MY FATHER TRIED IT. In Daruvar, Croatia, he bought a piano, sat my oldest brother at it, and hired a teacher. Whenever Vlado made a mistake, the teacher caned his fingers. After a few such lessons, Vlado skipped one; the teacher complained and wanted his money. Vlado said he was beaten; the teacher denied it. Father believed the teacher, and beat Vlado for maligning such a gentleman. After that, Vlado made sure not to play the piano again. Father attempted to persuade him a few times with the belt and a stick, which only confirmed Vlado’s impression of the piano as the black instrument of torture.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“Why do we have two ears and one mouth? In order to talk half as much as we listen.”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country

“When I talk on the phone with my brother Ivo, who is a theology instructor at Baylor, he invariably wants to talk politics, and I hear clicking in the background, and I say, Why talk politics, just remember where we are! I used to have that experience with my older brother Vlado in Yugoslavia: I would want to expound my political views, but he would point to the phone, and say, Why talk politics, remember where we are. This is not America. How things have changed! Now I tell my brother Ivo, Remember where we are. This is not Croatia!”
― Josip Novakovich, Shopping for a Better Country