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Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?

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
Longings
Longing
Cutting
Lose
Loses
Without

More quotes by Amos Oz

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Different musical instruments provide for different music.
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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.
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That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.
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In many ways, I regard Sharon and Arafat as birds of a feather.
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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.
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I have been saying again and again that the case of Israel and Palestine, the case of Israel and the Arab world, and indeed the case of Israel and Europe, is not black and white. It's not a western movie.
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There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.
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In writing a novel, the writer must be able to identify emotionally and intellectually with two or three or four contradicting perspectives and give each of them very a convincing voice. It's like playing tennis with yourself and you have to be on both sides of the yard. You have to be on both sides, or all sides if there are more than two sides.
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All of my novels are democracies.
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Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.
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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.
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I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
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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
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I know one or two things about fanaticism and death, and I reject them.
Amos Oz
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I would love to leave my children and grandchildren a nicer world than the one I am going to leave them. But bearing in mind that I was born in the world of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, the legacy I leave them might not be as terrible as the legacy my parents and grandparents left to me.
Amos Oz
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I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.
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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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I think there are one or two things similar in Elizabethan English and contemporary Hebrew. This is not to say that every one of us Israeli writers is a William Shakespeare, but there is a certain similarity to Elizabethan English.
Amos Oz
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Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
Amos Oz
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My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing.
Amos Oz