My Cat Yugoslavia Quotes

Anyone can change the direction of his life, any time at all, if only he has enough motivation: that was the moral of the story. The cat found it easier to believe this than to think about what it actually meant: that the word anyone actually referred to a very small group of people, that time has no direction, and that motivation is rarely the salient difference between people.

It’s impossible for us to love another person in the same way as we love ourselves. There is nothing more tragic than a mother who talks endlessly about her children in an attempt to demonstrate that it’s possible after all. If

Immigrants have to grow a thick skin if they want to do something more than wait hand and foot on the Finns, my father used to say. Go ahead, do as they do. Ruin your life by being like them, but one day you’ll see that if you try to become their equal, they’ll despise you all the more, and then you’ll end up hating yourself. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

My child would become something greater than me; he would know things I could never learn. Perhaps, I thought, this feeling was the very reason why people decide to become parents in the first place.

God did nothing with that child because there was no God. There was war, and war was a row of tornadoes tearing up the ground one after the other, and war was a set of tidal waves swallowing up buildings, villages, towns, a tsunami of water kneading them into a paste before finally spitting them out.

I had thought of saying good-bye to him, saying good-bye to the last twenty years,

I’m sorry—for everything,” I said, and the air that had built up in my mouth burst out in a single gasp and I didn’t know whether I was crying with joy or because I’d finally said something I had wanted to say for so very long. “I’m sorry too. If only this had turned out somehow…,” he began and started to gasp for breath, “…differently.” For a moment all I could hear was rushing at the other end, the sound of my father wiping his beard.

When the news reported the events in Račak on January 15, 1999, we began to question the existence of God. What had that woman, gunned down, ever done to the Serbs? What had that child done, what had those desperate men done, men who realized their village was surrounded by Serb troops? And when those men saw the soldiers shooting randomly at innocent people, where was God then? Where was he? When men who had been captured were suddenly told, Run away, and when those men ran away up the hill only to be cut down halfway there, where was he? And when after this skirmish they showed video footage of an orphaned little boy weeping, what did God do with that child?

My father used to say there was no evil in the world in the form in which we imagine evil to exist. As he watched news of the unfolding conflict in Kosovo he said we should come up with another word for evil, and that name should be laziness.

There was no use wasting time daydreaming if you were too close to your own dreams, because there was a greater likelihood that those dreams would come true, and then you’d have to accept that making those dreams come true wasn’t quite everything you’d imagined. And that—the disappointment, the anger, the bitterness and greed—that was a fate far worse than never making your dreams come true at all. A man should always strive for something he can never achieve, my father used to say.

When I realized the only reason I went to school in the first place was because an illiterate woman had no chance of marrying a decent husband,

because loathing is so much stronger than anger. You can give in to anger, you can get over it or let it take over your life, but loathing works in a different way. It burrows down under your nails, and even if you bite your fingers off, it won’t go away.

between men there are no questions. There’s no abuse, no reasoning.

How beautiful he is, I thought for a moment, and how lucky I am that he’s come.

And the girl’s father shook his head and deemed the girl’s ideas of love and happiness childish and unrealistic, because what’s most important in life is not love and happiness but peace.

she told the girl that in some places it was customary for the groom to bring the cat to his newly wed bride on their wedding night and kill it with his bare hands to demonstrate to his wife his supremacy, to teach her to fear him.

Try to teach them something, but they’ll never learn. Give them a job and they’ll steal your money. Give them an apartment and they’ll trash it, though they don’t even have to pay for it themselves,” said the cat sternly. “Good God,

people from villages like ours didn’t move to the cities through hard work or by immersing themselves in learning. That only happened in the movies.

God is something so immense that his presence actually means his absence, and his absence his presence.