Quotes from Amos Oz

As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.

Love is a kind of infection, possessing then releasing you.

with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.

Many a wise man lacks for sense, Many a fool has a heart of gold, Happiness often ends in tears, But what's inside can never be told.

They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of God, even if he has a tendency to forget it.

La tragedia de los hombres, decía Shaltiel, no estriba en que los perseguidos y los oprimidos aspiren a liberarse y a hacerse respetar. No. La maldad está en que los oprimidos, en lo más profundo de sus corazones, realmente sueñan en convertirse en opresores de sus opresores. Los perseguidos anhelan ser perseguidores. Los siervos sueñan con ser amos.

assemble and disperse, everything changes and is transformed, but no-o-othing can ever change from being to not-being. Not even the tiniest hair growing on the tail of some virus. The concept of infinity is indeed open, infinitely open, but at the same time it is also closed and hermetically sealed. Nothing leaves and nothing enters.

L'amore è una faccenda intima strana e piena di contraddizioni, visto che non di rado amiamo qualcuno solo perchè amiamo noi stessi, per egoismo, avidità, desiderio fisico, brama di dominare l'oggetto d'amore e asservirlo; o al contrario, per desiderio di asservirci e essere dominati dal nostro amante, e in fondo l'amore assomiglia all'odio e gli è più prossimo di quanto non si pensi normalmente.

Power has the power to prevent our annihilation for the time being. On condition that we always remember, at every moment, that in a situation like ours power can only prevent. It can't settle anything and it can't solve anything. It can only stave off disaster for a while.

To be honest, I was sometimes even jealous of those starving children in India, because nobody ever told them to finish up everything on their plate.

Kad sam bio dijete, nadao sam se da ?u kad odrastem postati knjiga. Ne književnik, nego knjiga. Ljude se može pobiti kao mrave, pa ni književnike nije teško ubiti. Ali za knjigu, ?ak i ako je sustavno unište, postoji šansa da se neki primjerak spasio i da ?e nastaviti živjeti na polici, živjeti nijemim životom na nekoj od zaboravljenih polica u nekoj zaba?enoj knjižnici, u Rejkjaviku, Valladolidu ili Vancouveru.

Sounds of four o'clock in the morning come to him through the window: the swish of a sprinkler on the lawn, broken cries of alarm from a parked car that can no longer bear its loneliness, the low weeping of a man in the next-door apartment, on the other side of the wall, the shriek of a nightbird nearby that can perhaps already see what is hidden from you and me.

a nutshell, the choice is between going through this life awake or in a kind of stupor.

Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!

Thomas Mann writes somewhere that hatred is simply love with a minus sign placed before it.

the Jews' religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma. But behind this faith in the diploma there was something else, something more complicated, more secret, and that is that girls in those days, even modern girls, like us, girls who went to school and then to university, were always taught that women are entitled to an education

my life too would become a new song, a life as pure and straightforward and simple as a glass of water on a hot day.

only a woman has the power to choose whether or not to bestow.

When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, Jews go home to Palestine. Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, Jews get out of Palestine.

after two thousand years we've established a state so as to have someone to steal from.

io, mio caro, non credo nell'amore universale. L'amore esiste in dosi modiche. Si possono amare forse cinque fra uomini e donne, dieci magari, talvolta financo quindici. E anche questo solo assai di rado. Ma se uno arriva e mi dice che ama tutto il Terzo mondo, o ama l'America Latina, o ama il sesso femminile, quello non è amore ma retorica. Pura demagogia. Slogan. Non siamo nati per amare più di una manciata di persone.

The Jews here are actually a single big refugee camp, and so are the Arabs. And now the Arabs live day by day with the disaster of their defeat, and the Jews live night by night with the dread of their vengeance.

Blessed are the dreamers, and cursed be the man who opens their eyes. True, the dreamers cannot save us, neither they nor their disciples, but without dreams and without dreamers the curse that lies upon us would be seven times heavier. Thanks to the dreamers, maybe we who are awake are a little less ossified and desperate than we would be without them.

Sometimes Yoel had the feeling that it was not his sexual organ but his whole being that was penetrating and luxuriating inside her womb. That he was entirety wrapped up and quivering inside her. Until with each caress the difference between caresser and caressed vanished, as though they had ceased being a man and a woman making love and had become one flesh.