Dejan Stojanovic
Dejan Stojanoviæ was born in Pec, Kosovo (the former Yugoslavia), in 1959. Although a lawyer by education, he has never practiced law and instead became a journalist. He is a poet, essayist, philosopher, and businessman and published six critically acclaimed books of poetry in Serbia: "Circling," "The Sun Watches the Sun," "The Sign and Its Children," "The Shape," "The Creator," and "Dance of Time." In 1986, as a young writer, he was recognized among 200 writers at the Bor (former Yugoslavia) Literary Festival. He also received the prestigious "Rastko Petrovic" Award from the Society of Serbian Writers for his book of interviews with major European and American artists and writers. In addition to poetry and prose, he has worked as a correspondent for the Serbian weekly magazine "Pogledi" ("Views"). His book of interviews from 1990 to 1992 in Europe and America, entitled Conversations, included interviews with several major American writers, including Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow, Charles Simic, and Steve Tesic. He has been living in Chicago since 1990.
261 Quotes (Page 1 of 3)
The universe is God’s son.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.
— Dejan Stojanovic
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem But that is impossible; The world has written its own.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Cosmos is God, who whispered the syllable of life.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Life is only a flicker of melted ice.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.
— Dejan Stojanovic
God is a cloud from which rain fell.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Darkness does not age; nothing is always nothing.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In the essence of truth lies deceit. Deceit dispels the boredom of the Absolute.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Absolute is a game with only one player where Absolute forgets itself so it would have a reason to fulfill the motion while returning.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Absolute equals nothingness.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Everything and nothing are the same in the Absolute.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Procreation annihilates eternity.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Existence is the end of endless eternity without a beginning or an end.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Unborn eternity does not die; existence is dying and falls asleep in the eternity beyond existence.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Eternity is a glorious word but eternity is ice.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Our eternity is not real; it resembles us; it is our own invention; its scent is vanity.
— Dejan Stojanovic
When following God, Zero we never find.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The world is God’s salvation.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Universe is the Sun watching its own self.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The world is a fairy tale; we are its guardians.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Two forces create eternity – a fairy tale and a dream from the fairy tale.
— Dejan Stojanovic
God is busy and has no time for you.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Get close to grass and you’ll see a star.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Arrival in the world is really a departure and that, which we call departure, is only a return.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The same word we love and hate, leaves in different directions, taking different paths.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.
— Dejan Stojanovic
How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Everybody talks, but there is no conversation.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We hear only our own voices, still echoes returning to our emptiness.
— Dejan Stojanovic
When the long bygone Lee Po wanted to say something, he could do it with only a few words.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.
— Dejan Stojanovic
How alive is thought, invisible, yet without thought there is no sight.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The deeper thought is, the taller she becomes.
— Dejan Stojanovic
A smiling lie is a whirlwind, easy to enter, but hard to escape.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Truth is hard-hearted and unrelenting, too clear, precise; a lie is much more imaginative.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In the lie of truth lies the truth.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Teaching others, he corrected himself.
— Dejan Stojanovic
He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.
— Dejan Stojanovic
After Homer and Dante, is a whole century of creating worth one Shakespeare?
— Dejan Stojanovic
How does one say something new and not retell?
— Dejan Stojanovic
Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing.
— Dejan Stojanovic
He did not profess to anybody how to reach others without professing.
— Dejan Stojanovic
You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Do not look too far for you will see nothing.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Either you will be you or you will not be at all.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We need knew knights, but without swords.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Come out from within yourself, speak out.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself.
— Dejan Stojanovic
A breeze, a forgotten summer, a smile, all can fit into a storefront window.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.
— Dejan Stojanovic
His Highness was always confident in his statements, especially about what he viewed for the first time.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Now that we are all so smart, we don’t easily find resolutions.
— Dejan Stojanovic
He thought others were small; that was his greatness.
— Dejan Stojanovic
This dwarf still observes the world from his own self-imposed height.
— Dejan Stojanovic
If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There are no winners in real games.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The game itself is bigger than the winning.
— Dejan Stojanovic
You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.
— Dejan Stojanovic
For a game, you don’t need a teacher.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Faith is a question of eyesight; even the blind can see that.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Holy books are an insult to a God with good intentions.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Burning the witch Giordano Bruno is one more wound inflicted on Christ’s body.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Your head is a lit chamber.
— Dejan Stojanovic
The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.
— Dejan Stojanovic
What we call life is only talk of nature.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Nothing is inanimate; what is the rest is our interpretation.
— Dejan Stojanovic
We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards.
— Dejan Stojanovic
It is easy to see the glow but hard to recognize the awakening of silence.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Disease often comes with a smiling face.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.
— Dejan Stojanovic
He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Is it possible to write a poem or are these words just screams of outlaws exiled to the desert?
— Dejan Stojanovic
It’s not easy to write a poem about a poem.
— Dejan Stojanovic
You don’t know anything, but I know even less.
— Dejan Stojanovic
If you are good, they say you are weak.
— Dejan Stojanovic
If what we think of ourselves were true, the planet would overflow with geniuses. They blossomed; they did not talk about blossoming. They grew; they did not talk about growing.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Pose your questions to people and you will get countless useless answers.
— Dejan Stojanovic
From whichever side I start, I think I am in an old place where others have been before me.
— Dejan Stojanovic
For a moment at least, be a smile on someone else’s face.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.
— Dejan Stojanovic
There are many secrets; don’t try to resolve them all.
— Dejan Stojanovic
They are both spectacular, life and death.
— Dejan Stojanovic
In greatness, life and death merge.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Nothing is made, nothing disappears. These are the old truths. The same changes, at the same places, never stopping.
— Dejan Stojanovic
He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love.
— Dejan Stojanovic
Wherever I go, I run into myself.
— Dejan Stojanovic