Inside & Out of Byzantium Quotes

“I look up some old friends, journalists. One is a senior editor at L’Express, and he complains to me that he has in his hands extensive documentation of war crimes in Yugoslavia but no one, including his own magazine, will print it. He asks me if I would translate it into English. With the documents are photographs of hundreds of Yugoslav children brutally murdered in villages from all over the country. The documents detail the facts about the massacres of Serbs in Glina, then at the Gracanica bridge. There are murky stories about prisoners and death camps. Looking through those photographs I realize that no language would ever be adequate to convey the horror - but how will I be able to write poetry again?”
― Nina Živančević, Inside & Out of Byzantium

“At the conference I was asked whether all Yugoslav writers were now forced to live in exile. I answered that I was far more concerned about the people who were not writers who were forced into exile. Writers are familiar with the conditions of exile; exile is not foreign to writers, they often choose to live that way. Exile can be one’s state of mind even while living in one’s own homeland. I’ve chosen to live in many different countries over the years because I’ve always felt closer to mankind per se than to any nation in particular, even my own. Until recently it had seemed banal to say that every person is entitled to think and breathe under the same sky, but as our imperfect human race has difficulty recalling its own history, we’re now obligated to state the obvious over and over again.”
― Nina Živančević, Inside & Out of Byzantium