Ivo Andric

Ivo Andrić was a Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer, and the 1961 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Signs near the travel-road

• From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.

• If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.

• One shouldn't be afraid of the humans.
  Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them.

• What can and doesn't have to be always, at the end, surrenders to something that has to be.

• What doesn't hurt - is not life; what doesn't pass - is not happiness.

• When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

• What does your sorrow do while you sleep? -It’s awake and waiting. And when it loses patience, it wakes me up.

• And then the death will come. The great parting, but the least painful of all the goodbyes we ever knew. For in death, only one shall grieve. And so far we have always, at every parting, grieved together.

• I do not fear invisible worlds.

• It seems to me, that if people only knew how hard it was for me to endure life, they would find it easier to forgive me for all the wrong things I’ve done and all the good things that I have failed to do. And they would still find a little compassion within them to pity me.