Daily Inspiration Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Žbanić’s line has the clipped urgency of someone who’s watched “normal life” turn into a survival tactic. In the Balkans context that shadows her work - Sarajevo under siege, postwar Bosnia’s long hangover of grief and denial - “culture” isn’t a luxury item you return to when the lights come back on. It’s proof-of-life. When institutions collapse and violence rewrites the rules, the simplest human acts (going to a screening, making a film, singing, telling a story) become a way to refuse the aggressor’s main objective: reducing people to bodies that can be moved, counted, erased.

The phrasing is telling: “People felt” doesn’t claim a neat philosophy; it reports a communal instinct. And “if you don’t go on” frames culture as continuation, not achievement. The subtext is that trauma doesn’t just kill; it dehumanizes by interrupting narrative. War makes time feel like a loop of alarms and loss. Culture reintroduces sequence: before, during, after. It gives memory a shape that isn’t only horror.

There’s also a quiet provocation in tying humanity to cultural practice. Not “you are sad” or “you are broken”, but “you are not human being” - an ungrammatical bluntness that lands like testimony. It challenges the peacetime myth that art is optional, an add-on to real life. For Žbanić, culture is the mechanism by which life counts as life. Without it, you survive, but you don’t quite exist.