Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Amos Oz
Age: 79 †
Born: 1939
Born: May 4
Died: 2018
Died: December 28
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Pedagogue
Poet
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Jerusalem
Middle East
Amos Klausner
Children
Conflict
Oppressors
Much
Cases
Arab
Parent
Victims
Another
Cruel
Two
Jew
Past
Victim
Look
Image
Looks
Case
Oppressor

More quotes by Amos Oz

Image
Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?
Amos Oz
Image
The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. All of them take place in Israel - in Jerusalem, in the desert, in the kibbutz, in small towns, in villages.
Amos Oz
Image
Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
Amos Oz
Image
Of course, we carry inside of ourselves our parents. Even when they are dead, we carry them inside ourselves. And they are carrying inside themselves their dead parents and so on and so forth. There is a legacy of language and culture and religion.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
Literature is not made of ideas and it's not made of concepts, of psychological analysis. It's made of words.
Amos Oz
Image
The State of the Jews was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.
Amos Oz
Image
Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.
Amos Oz
Image
When I need to take a side, I write a newspaper article and I tell my government, You should not do that, you should do this. They don't listen to me, but I've been doing this for sixty years now. But, when I write a novel, I am not in that business.
Amos Oz
Image
I prefer to talk about the gift of literature rather than its role or task.
Amos Oz
Image
A little more than a hundred years ago, Tel Aviv was not a city. It was a title of a novel written by an author. The Return to Zion was a name of another novel. There was a bookshelf. There was no country. There was no state. There was no nation. There was no physical Jewish reality in this country.
Amos Oz
Image
The only way to keep a dream, any dream at all, to keep a dream perfect and rosy and intact and unsullied is never to live it out.
Amos Oz
Image
Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written. The very same book, even if it is translated very accurately, let's say from Hebrew into English or from English into Hebrew, becomes a different book because language is a musical instrument.
Amos Oz
Image
The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.
Amos Oz
Image
I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
Image
In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.
Amos Oz
Image
On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
Amos Oz
Image
The alternative to fanaticism and to death is not some miraculous realization that someone has been wrong and he has to apologize. No, the answer to fanaticism and to death is curiosity and compromise and concession.
Amos Oz