Home > Author > Pajtim Statovci
41 " 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, "
― Pajtim Statovci , Kissani Jugoslavia
42 " 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. "
43 " Finnish people can’t see what a privileged life they lead, as though they’ve never heard of a world outside their borders. "
― Pajtim Statovci , Crossing
44 " The Albanian spoken in Kosovo was completely different from ours; it sounded childlike and unsure of itself. People here used strange words, they called a plate a tanir instead of a pjatë, and a drinking glass was called bardak instead of gotë. "
45 " The people were poor, they smelled bad and talked incessantly, nobody seemed to have a job or anything in particular to do, everybody had yellow teeth and damp stains beneath their armpits, and as I looked out across the meadows where my father had walked and the houses in which his family lived I wasn’t remotely surprised that he’d wanted to leave, because there was no room to breathe out here, there was no escape. "
46 " 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. "
47 " This life is worth nothing at all; only the next life is worth something. "
48 " Although only one of us had gone, and we were no longer the same people, everything had changed, and everybody—the kids at school, the people in our neighborhood and extended family—thought we were so downtrodden by all that had happened to us that we started to behave as though it were all true and didn’t make the least effort to get on with our lives. "
49 " 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. "
50 " It’s not my place, I tell her. That’s why I left, that’s why I’ve never spoken about it to anyone but you, I say, and she nods sympathetically. And from then on I haven’t had a homeland, only other lands, strange countries in which I’ve had to make a home, "
51 " 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. "
52 " 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. "