Quotes from Amos Oz

To write about things that exist, to try to capture a color or smell or sound in words, is a little like playing Schubert when Schubert is sitting in the hall, and perhaps sniggering in the darkness.

Zbor din tine în tine

Tento realçar a nossa capacidade de de nos imaginarmos uns aos outros. Façamo-lo a todos os níveis, começando pelo mais quotidiano. Imaginemos o outro quando lutamos, imaginemos o outro quando nos queixamos, imaginemos o outro precisamente quando sentimos que temos cem por cento de razão. Mesmo quando se tem cem por cento de razão e o outro está cem por cento equivocado, continua a ser útil imaginar o outro.

His life is his prison while his death is limned to him as a prospect of paradoxical resurrection, a promise of miraculous redemption from his vale of tears.

Once, when I was seven or eight, my mother said to me, as we sat on the last seat but one on the bus to the clinic or the shoe shop, that while it was true that books could change with the years just as much as people could, the difference was that whereas people would always drop you when they could no longer get any advantage or pleasure or interest or at least a good feeling from you, a book would never abandon you.

Conformidad y uniformidad, la urgencia por «pertenecer a» y el deseo de hacer que todos los demás «pertenezcan a», pueden constituir perfectamente las formas de fanatismo más ampliamente difundidas, aunque no las más peligrosas.

None of these countries wanted them: they all had enough Jews already. (None is too many, ministers in Canada and Switzerland said at the time, and other countries felt the same without advertising the fact.)

Há boas e más novas no café. A má, é que o tempo corre. A boa, é que o tempo cura.

Tuttavia, nessuno in paese usciva mai di casa quando era buio. Perché il buio, dicevano i genitori, il buio è pieno di cose che è decisamente meglio non incontrare.

Forse perché la derisione è una forma di difesa per chi la usa, contro il pericolo della solitudine? Perché si deride in compagnia, mentre chi suscita il riso resta immancabilmente da solo?

This is the anarchist core, the rebellious gene that has flickered for thousands of years in Jewish culture. We don't just follow orders. We want justice, and we demand it even from the Creator.

What does the pale ring around the moon portend? Usually it heralds a khamsin. Tomorrow, no doubt, the heat will return. It is May, and June will follow. A wind drifts among the cypresses in the night, trying to comfort them between one heat wave and the next. It is the way of the wind to come and to go and to come again. There is nothing new.

You might even say I loved my punishment of solitary confinement. Whoever doesn't need other human beings, Father quoted Aristotle, must be a god or an animal. For hours on end, I enjoyed being both. I didn't mind.

I give no sign. Maybe the reason I decided to behave in this way was that Mother had taught me that you can tell real kings and nobles by the fact that they despise their titles and know full well that true nobility consists in behaving toward the simplest people with humility, like an ordinary human being.

If you have no more tears left to weep, then don't weep. Laugh.

Fanaticism ... is contagious: a person may catch it even as he fights to cure other people of it. There is no shortage of anti-fanaticism fanatics in the world. All sorts of crusades to stop jihad, and jihads to subjugate the new crusaders. This includes the zeal so prevalent in Israel and in the West these days to deliver a knockout blow that will finish off all the bloodthirsty fanatics and anyone like them once and for all. To eradicate every last bastion of zealotry.

men can't help themselves, that's just the way they are made, but women in her view are actually not much better, and that's why love is something that one way or another always turns out badly.

Kad su moji prijatelji otkrili da se družimo, po?eli su me nazivati izdajnikom. Nakon mnogo dana polako sam pronašao utjehu u misli da je izdajnik u o?ima fanatika onaj koji se usu?uje promijeniti. Svaka vrsta fanatizma, u svako vrijeme i na svakome mjestu, izražava gnušanje prema promjeni, strahuje od nje te sumnji?avo vidi promjenu zapravo kao izdaju koja izvire iz mra?nih i podlih pobuda.

Lo que me rodeaba no me interesaba. Todo lo que me interesaba estaba hecho de palabras.

Curiosity and imagination are bound together. The age-old human urge to peek behind other people's drawn shutters, the eagerness to compare one's own intimate secrets with the secret intimacy of others, is an urge that may serve as an antidote to the fanatic's lust to murder the difference between himself and others. Or to kill anyone who refuses to change and declines to be exactly like him.

Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.

I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.

I was born in a tiny little enclave of terrified Jewish refugees, less than half a million of them, with no clear perspective of a future - hopes, yes, but no clear perspective.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place.