Yehuda Amichai Quotes

#1. When you smile, serious ideas get exhausted. At night the mountains keep quiet beside you, in the morning the sand goes with you down to the beach. When you do nice things to me all the heavy industries shut down.

Yehuda Amichai

#2. People use each other
as a healing for their pain. They put each other
on their existential wound,
on the eye, on the cunt, on mouth and open hand.
They hold each other and won't let go.

Yehuda Amichai

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

Yehuda Amichai

#4. In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager)

Yehuda Amichai

#5. 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.

Yehuda Amichai

#6. I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai

#7. I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

Yehuda Amichai

#8. From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.

Yehuda Amichai

#9. Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

Yehuda Amichai

#10. Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.

Yehuda Amichai

#11. I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.

Yehuda Amichai

#12. I've never been in those places where I've never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own.

Yehuda Amichai

#13. Look, just as time isn't inside clocks
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.

Yehuda Amichai

#14. A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.

Yehuda Amichai

#15. Only my penis is still free and happy, no good for sword fights and no good for any work, or even for hanging things on, or for digging trenches. Praise be to God that it is so.

Yehuda Amichai

#16. The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.

Yehuda Amichai

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

Yehuda Amichai

#18. But peace returns to my heart.
Not peace as it used to be
before it left me years ago. It went away to school,
matured as I did,
and came back looking like me.

Yehuda Amichai

#19. And what will you do now? You'll collect loves
Like stamps. You've got doubles and no one
Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.

Yehuda Amichai

#20. I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there.

Yehuda Amichai

#21. It was not an adventure; it was my life.

Yehuda Amichai

#22. Spy (1973)
Many years ago,
I was sent
to spy out the land beyond the age of thirty.
And I stayed there
and didn't go back to my senders,
so as not to be made
to tell
about this land
and made
to lie.

Yehuda Amichai

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

Yehuda Amichai

#24. Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself
without anyone noticing.

Yehuda Amichai

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

Yehuda Amichai

#26. Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games, which are so much alike, everywhere.

Yehuda Amichai

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

Yehuda Amichai

#28. 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.

Yehuda Amichai

#29. Now and then, I remember you in times
Unbelievable. And in places not made for memory
But for the transient, the passing that does not remain.

Yehuda Amichai

#30. I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.

Yehuda Amichai

#31. Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

Yehuda Amichai

#32. 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.

Yehuda Amichai

#33. Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave a little love burning always like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby that gives him a bit of security and quiet love though he doesn't know what the light is or where it comes from.

Yehuda Amichai

#34. And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be
like barbed wire to keep out despair,
hope must be a mine field.

Yehuda Amichai

#35. The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.

Yehuda Amichai

#36. Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife
I sharpen heart on heart inside me.

Yehuda Amichai

#37. Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

Yehuda Amichai

#38. The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai