Quotes by Amos Oz

“I calld the devil, and he came / And with wonder his form did I closely scan / He is not ugly, and is not lame / But really a handsome and charming man / A man in the prime of life is the devil / Obliging, a man of the world, and civil / A diplomatist too, well skilld in debate / He talks quite glibly of church and state.”

“Two years ago, a sudden change occurred. Sharons rhetoric changed overnight.”

“Literary and political work helps people to ged rid of stereotypes”

“Activism is a Way of Life”

“The evacuation of the settlements from the Gaza Strip is not just a struggle over the question of the fate of the territories. Fundamentally, it is the first great battle over the question of religion and state.”

“For more than 30 years, ... the settlers dream has overwhelmed the dream of secular Israelis. Day in and day out, the vision of Greater Israel and the reign of the Messiah crushed the hope of being a free people and building a just society.”

“The Jewish settlers of Gaza and in the West Bank have a dream for the future of Israel.... The settlers dream is to create a Greater Israel with Jewish settlements wall-to-wall.... In such a state, democracy will have to bow to the rabbis. The Knesset, the government, the Supreme Court, will be allowed to continue to exist, provided that the rabbis approve of their decisions.... If we, secular Israelis, erase our own existence, the settlers will shower us with brotherly love. But if we insist that we have a different vision for Israel, we immediately become traitors, Arab-lovers or even Nazis.”

“Sippur al ahava vehoshekh”

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.

Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. Thats how the world is made.

ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters from other tongues and cultures.

… that sour blend of loneliness and lust for recognition, shyness and extravagance, deep insecurity and self-intoxicated egomania, that drives poets and writers out of their rooms to seek each other out, to rub shoulders with one another, bully, joke, condescend, feel each other, lay a hand on a shoulder or an arm round a waist, to chat and argue with little nudges, to spy a little, sniff out what is cooking in other pots, flatter, disagree, collude, be right, take offence, apologise, make amends, avoid each other, and seek each other’s company again.

She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.

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.

I have written various words, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and bits of dismantled sentences, fragments of expressions and descriptions and all kinds of tentative combinations. Every now and again I pick up one these particles, these molecules of texts, hold it up to the light and examine it carefully, turn it in various directions, lean forward and rub or polish it, hold it up to the light again, rub it again slightly, then lean forward and fit it into the texture of the cloth I am weaving. Then I stare at it from different angles, still not entirely satisfied, and take it out again and replace it with another word, or try to fit it into another niche in the same sentence, then remove, file it down a tiny bit more, and try to fit it in again, perhaps at a slightly different angle. Or deploy it differently. Perhaps farther down the sentence. Or at the beginning of the next one. Or should I cut it off and make it into a one-word sentence on its own? I stand up. Walk around the room. Return to the desk. Stare at it for a few moments or longer, cross out the whole sentence or tear up the whole page. I give up in despair. I curse myself aloud and curse writing in general and the language as a whole, despite which I sit down and start putting the whole thing together all over again. [p.268]

And in this respect, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim.

I find the family the most mysterious and fascinating institution in the world.