The World and All That It Holds Quotes

“If you live long enough, you learn that nothing has ever been, nor will it ever be, the way it used to be.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds: A Novel

“We cannot stay here, Osman said.
Why not?
We are not from here.
We are not from anywhere.
We are from Bosnia, from Sarajevo. I want to go home.
You are my home. I am your home. Am I your home?
Home is where people notice when you are not there.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“There can be no world without history, he concludes; the question is who writes it, and whoever writes it shapes the world, which cannot exist without a shape.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“All right then. Let’s stay alive, Osman said. Stop asking questions.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“Each blast is a soul departing. Merima asks, Who are those people, Allah have mercy on their mothers?”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“Pinto understood that there was no sense in fantasizing about different outcomes: everything that happens is always the only thing that could happen; everything before this moment leads to this moment.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“God was invented by the lonely people, by those who could not bear to think that no one would ever care about them, spend a thought on their loneliness. We are not chosen, what we are is terribly lonely and unloved. And all those righteous men who withdraw from the world to be with God—they’re leaving us behind because they think they can spend their life with the only being that truly loves them.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“God
was invented by the lonely people, by those who could not bear to think that
no one would ever care about them, spend a thought on their loneliness. We
are not chosen, what we are is terribly lonely and unloved. And all those
righteous men who withdraw from the world to be with God—they’re
leaving us behind because they think they can spend their life with the only
being that truly loves them.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“Thank good God you are a
nothing and a nobody, Osman repeated, and they all laughed at their own safe insignificance.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds

“They say, as the gardener, so the garden.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The World and All That It Holds