It was on it that I measured my step and adapted my stride. It never left me, all my life.
Visegrad—with its mixed Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish community living among the rugged hills of Bosnia—is the setting for many of Andric's works. This background provided his choice of themes and point of departure throughout his writing career. The four years he spent in elementary school there were the happiest of his formal education and evidently helped foster in him the fascination with books and the life of the imagination that was to stay with him always. His home was humble, and, like all the poor houses of Bosnia, it would have contained no books except possibly one or two reference works or church calendars. Even secondary school offered little or no literature, and during his school years in Sarajevo there were only three or four stationery shops that also stocked a few books. Andric has described how he used to spend hours as a schoolboy in front of the window of one of these shops—for him the only window into the world—and at night he would go home and dream about it: "Then it was no longer an ordinary shop window, with books in it, but ...
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