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I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.

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
Great
Idealists
Idealist
Compromise
Believer
Popular
Among
Young

More quotes by Amos Oz

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Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time.
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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.
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I follow the way people change. I follow the way people, who are very antagonized to one another become very close to one another and vice-versa. Sometimes I follow the way people who are intimately close to each other move apart. This is my business as a novelist. It is not about positions and ideas.
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Many intellectuals in America and in Europe, they are in the habit of taking sides: who are the bad guys? who are the good guys? They launch a demonstration against the bad guys, sign a petition in favor of the good guys, and going to sleep feeling well about themselves.
Amos Oz
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Things can be translated, but they become different.
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On my parents scale of values, the more Western something was, the more cultured it was considered.
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I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.
Amos Oz
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All of my novels are democracies.
Amos Oz
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Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
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Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
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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My musical instrument is Hebrew and, to me, this is the most important fact about my writing. I write in words. I don write in sounds or in shapes or in flavors. I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.
Amos Oz
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The gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded.
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A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.
Amos Oz
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We lived through a relatively golden age between the end of World War II and Sept. 11, 2001.
Amos Oz
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I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.
Amos Oz
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Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.
Amos Oz
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We all begin much much much earlier. 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
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The battlefield is first and foremost horrible stenches, not sights, not sounds, but stenches. They don't travel well into literature.
Amos Oz
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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