Quotes from Yehuda Amichai

The sun thought that Jerusalem was a sea and set in her: a terrible mistake.

A Tourist On a great rock by the Jaffa Gate sat a golden girl from Scandinavia and oiled herself with suntan oil as if on the beach. I told her, don't go into these alleys, a net of bachelors in heat is spread there, a snare of lechers. And further inside, in half-darkness, the groaning trousers of old men, and unholy lust in the guise of prayer and grief and seductive chatter in many languages. Once Hebrew was God's slang in these streets, now I use it for holy desire.

I don't drink wine; but everything the wine doesn't do to me is a black abyss without drunkenness, a dark empty vineyard where they tread and bruise the soles of their feet on the hard stone.

If only it were possible to grasp the moment when two people first become strangers to each other.

People caught in a homeland-trap: to speak now in this weary language, a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled, it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.

Now all I know how to do is to grow dark in the evening. I'm happy with what I've got. And all I wish to say is my name and address, and perhaps my father's name, like a prisoner of war who, according to the Geneva Convention, is not required to say a single word more.

We begged you, Lord, to divide right from wrong and instead you divided the waters above the firmament from those beneath it. We begged for the knowledge of good and evil, and you gave us all kinds of rules and regulations like the rules of soccer

I'm like a rifle that's a little out of date but very accurate: when I love, there's a strong recoil, back to childhood, and it hurts.

I tried to go out into my time and to know, but I couldn't get any farther than the body of the woman beside me.

Jerusalem, the only city in the world where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.

already she drew in the sand with her big toe: King Solomon, as though he were a rubber ball, an apocalyptic, bearded herring, an imperial walking-stick, an amalgam, half chicken and half Solomon.

I'm made from remnants of flesh and blood And leftovers of philosophies.

The enormous snow was set down far away. Sometimes I must use my love as the only way to describe it, and must hire the wind to demonstrate the wailing of women. It's hard for stones that roll from season to season to remember the dreamers and the whisperers in the grass, who fell in their love. And like a man who keeps shaking his wrist when his watch stops: Who is shaking us? Who?

Sono il profeta di ciò che è stato, io leggo il passato nel palmo della mano della donna che amo, prevedo le piogge invernali già cadute, sono un esperto della neve dell'anno scorso, richiamo dagli inferi le cose che sono state, vaticino ieri e ier l'altro. Sono il profeta di ciò che è stato

My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard and I left it once, before I was finished, and he remained there with his big, empty worry.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.

It was not an adventure; it was my life.

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.

The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.

Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.

And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.

I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.

Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.