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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

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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
Single
Imagine
Small
Pleasure
Reading
Sips
Take
Delightful
Every
Exception
Time
Experienced

More quotes by Amos Oz

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Israel is imperfect, of course it is - a far cry from the monumental dreams of the founding fathers. One of the reasons is that their dreams were unrealistic. They were bigger than life. These were messianic dreams, dreams about total redemption for the Jews, for the world. Such dreams do not come true, not in their entirety.
Amos Oz
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I never regard my characters, my protagonists, as personifications. It's not that I sit by my desk and I pick up a character who will be the spokesperson of the Israeli Left, another one will be the spokesperson of the Right, another one will be the spokesperson of Middle Eastern Jews, European Jews, religions Jews and so on.
Amos Oz
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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
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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
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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
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Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
Amos Oz
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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
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On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
Amos Oz
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We have to carry through to the next day and hope that we will be okay tomorrow as we are today and in the meantime, enjoy life.
Amos Oz
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Don't write about that which you don't know.
Amos Oz
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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
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I don't write novels about expeditions to the planet Mars because I haven't been there and I don't know anything about it.
Amos Oz
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Donald Trump basically said: One state, two states, do whatever you like. I do not think this was a serious statement of American policy. This was him shrugging his shoulders and saying: Who cares about it. I think he doesn't even have the faintest idea of what he wants to do in the Middle East.
Amos Oz
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The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.
Amos Oz
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Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.
Amos Oz
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The morning I woke up and it was announced that Trump was the elected president of the United States, I wrote to Angela Merkel. I said that she - at least for me - is now the leader of the free world.
Amos Oz
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If people are pro-Israel, they are pro-Israel one-hundred-and-twenty percent. If they are anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian, they tend to be pro-Palestinian one-hundred-and-twenty percent.
Amos Oz
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The State of the Jews was not a title of a country. It was a title of a futuristic novel.
Amos Oz
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Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
Amos Oz
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Actually, who hasn't been through the ghastly experience of sitting in front of a blank page, with its toothless mouth grinning at you: Go ahead, let's see you lay a finger on me? A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant.
Amos Oz