Quotes from Amos Oz

Era talvez meu hábito 'profissional' de colocar-me no lugar, ou na pele, dos outros. Isso não significa que sempre justifico esses outros, mas que tenho a capacidade de enxergar seus pontos de vista p. 95.

books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic.

I read your poems with interest and found them serious, original, linguistically fresh, but first of all you must learn to curb your excess of emotion and write with more distance. As if you the person writing the poems and you the suffering young man are two different people, and as though the former observes the latter coolly, distantly, even with a measure of amusement.

My father used to say: If you steal from one book, you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books, you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.)

He always imagined that silence was somehow directed against him. Or that it was his fault.

on expensive dressmakers who made her luxurious dresses. But she was too mean to wear them: she saved them up at the back of her closet, and most of the time she wore an old mouse-colored housecoat.

And what if ever on some distant day a memory comes to you of an old familiar whiff or the sound of dogs barking far off or a driving hailstorm at dawn and you suddenly fail to grasp what it is you have done, what madness might have possessed you, what devil lured you from your home to the end of the world?

I wasn't jealous and I wasn't resentful. Maybe it's the people who are the least loved, provided they're not envious or bitter, who find the most love in themselves to give to others. Don't you think?

all the things we think are important really aren't, and he had no time to think about the things that really are. His whole life was going by and he had never contemplated the big, simple truths: loneliness and longing, desire and death.

That's how God created us: wealth is a crime and poverty is a punishment, though the punishment is not given to the one who sinned, but to the one who hasn't got the money to escape the punishment. The woman, naturally, cannot deny that she is pregnant. The man denies it as much as he likes, and what can you do? God gave men the pleasure and us the punishment.

Success flows from perspiration, and inspiration from diligence and effort.

Fundamentally, suspicion, enjoyment of persecution, and even hatred of the entire human race are all much less lethal than a love of humanity, which reeks of ancient rivers of blood. In my view, gratuitous hatred is less bad than gratuitous love.

Aquellos que no se entusiasman con nada se enfrían y comienzan a morirse. Hay que empezar a desear de verdad. Coger la vida con las dos manos para que no se escape, si es que comprendéis lo que quiero decir. Si no, todo está perdido.

Suspicion, like an acid, corrodes the vessel in which it is put and eats away at the suspicious man himself: guarding oneself day and night from the entire human race, constantly devising ways of avoiding evil schemes and conspiracies, and sniffing out snares laid for you-- this is what the Talmud calls 'primary categories of damages.' And these are the things that, as rabbis say, take a man out of the world.

The westerly breeze was light and silent, as if it had been sent to cool a glass of tea.

You've held the world in your hands for thousands of years and you've turned it into a horror show.

se refieren al versículo «he encontrado que la mujer es más amarga que la muerte»26

the manikins, I mean the little men who held the shutters open during the day, those little metal figures: when you wanted to close the shutters you swivelled them round so that all night long they hung head down.

Een vreemde die geen vreemde meer is, begint de geliefde meteen te benauwen. - Amos Oz

I am not the lady's husband. I do not have that honor and pleasure. Atalia is, in fact, my mistress." He allowed a little time for Shmuel to wallow in his astonishment before deigning to explain: "I am not using the word in the vulgar sense, of course, but rather as in the famous saying of the first Queen Elizabeth of England: 'I will have here but one mistress and no master.

To pick a modern image we once heard, but can't remember where: life is like driving a car with its front window opaque. All you have to go by are your rearview mirrors.

And when she played the clarinet it was as though the music came not from the instrument but straight out of her body, only passing through the clarinet to pick up some sweetness and sadness, and taking you to a real, silent place where there is no enemy, no struggle, and where everything is free from shame and treachery and clear of thoughts of betrayal.

The sad thing is that sentimentality is constantly getting the better of my pure reason. Antediluvian memories tie me to you like a pair of handcuffs. You are stuck in my soul like a rusty nail without a head. And apparently I am stuck in you too, somewhere among the cogwheels you are equipped with instead of a soul.

The crime is the punishment.