Amos Oz Quotes

#1. He had the feeling that he must make a decision, and though he was used to making many decisions every day, this time he was beset with uncertainty; in fact he had no idea what was being asked of him

Amos Oz

#2. In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather.

Amos Oz

#3. The whole of reality was just a vain attempt to imitate the world of words.

Amos Oz

#4. 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.

Amos Oz

#5. If you change your diet, someone will call you a traitor.

Amos Oz

#6. If we don't stop somewhere, if we don't accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don't learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice - if we don't learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state.

Amos Oz

#7. Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.

Amos Oz

#8. Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent.

Amos Oz

#9. My whole life, I've never loved anything else

Amos Oz

#10. But for 30 years, Orthodox leaders have tipped the balance between hawks and doves, and have been in a position to determine who forms a coalition and who runs the country.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#12. 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.

Amos Oz

#13. Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: Yids, go back to Palestine, so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge shouts at us: Yids, get out of Palestine.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#15. Feelings are just a fire in a field of stubble: it burns for a moment, and then all that's left is soot and ashes. Do you know what the main thing is - the thing a woman should look for in her man? She should look for a quality that's not at all exciting but that's rarer than gold: decency.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#17. Nasty thoughts are more like worms in the cauliflower!

Amos Oz

#18. Once you have lifted your foot, do not be in a hurry to put it down again: who can tell what menacing nest of vipers you might step on.

Amos Oz

#19. 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.

Amos Oz

#20. And in fact that selfsame strange urge I had when I was small - the desire to grant a second chance to something that could never have one - is still one of the urges that set me going today whenever I sit down to write a story.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#22. There is no freedom about this: the world gives, and you just take what you're given, with no opportunity to choose.

Amos Oz

#23. The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.

Amos Oz

#24. When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.

Amos Oz

#25. I now believe that all journeys are ridiculous: the only journey from which you don't always come back empty-handed is the journey inside yourself.

Amos Oz

#26. Facts have a tendency to obscure the truth.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#28. The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like.

Amos Oz

#29. But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort.

Amos Oz

#30. A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.

Amos Oz

#31. Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.

Amos Oz

#32. The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.

Amos Oz

#33. The Gentiles used to say about us: the diploma - that's the Jews' religion. Not money, not gold. The diploma.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#35. I recommend the art of slow reading.

Amos Oz

#36. In a short story by Chekhov or a novel by Balzac he found mysteries which, so far as he was aware, did not exist in any spy thriller. 35

Amos Oz

#37. only until the children are born. Your life is your own only for a short time:

Amos Oz

#38. Ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters from other tongues and cultures.

Amos Oz

#39. Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz

#41. Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

Amos Oz

#42. But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others.

Amos Oz

#43. One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.

Amos Oz

#44. All of my novels are democracies.

Amos Oz

#45. Loneliness, mother said, is like a hammer blow that shatters glass but hardens steel.

Amos Oz

#46. Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.

Amos Oz

#47. 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.

Amos Oz

#48. 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.

Amos Oz

#49. On my parents' scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.

Amos Oz

#50. It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

Amos Oz

#51. 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.

Amos Oz

#52. I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.

Amos Oz

#53. Everything, every speck of dust, every drop of water continue to exist eternally, albeit in different forms, except for my soul?

Amos Oz

#54. We could talk about totally different things. Like the seasons of the year, for example, or even the star-filled sky of these summer nights: I'm interested in stars and nebulas. Maybe you are, too?

Amos Oz

#55. The important things were sensitivity to impressions, intuitive judgment, character assessment, and also patient bargaining skills. It had never so much as occurred to him to jump over walls or leap from roof to roof.

Amos Oz

#56. 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.

Amos Oz

#57. Tell me, is it true there's no word for Schadenfreude in English?

Amos Oz

#58. 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.

Amos Oz

#59. The best way to know the soul of another country is to read its literature.

Amos Oz

#60. I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.

Amos Oz

#61. (he was fond of the word "decidedly," as well as "nevertheless," "indeed," "in a certain sense," "unmistakably," "promptly," "on the other hand," and "utter disgrace").

Amos Oz

#62. Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.

Amos Oz

#63. Imagination needs food like every dog and every cat and every bird and every fish.

Amos Oz

#64. I wrote The Same Sea not as a political allegory about Israelis and Palestinians. I wrote it about something much more gutsy and immediate. I wrote it as a piece of chamber music.

Amos Oz

#65. Israel of the coastal plain, where eight out of ten Israeli Jews live far removed from the occupied territories, from the fiery Jerusalem, from the religious and nationalistic conflicts, is unknown to the outside world, almost unknown to itself.

Amos Oz

#66. 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.

Amos Oz

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

Amos Oz