Quote

I am an old man and I have seen things get revoked. Things which looked very irrevocable.

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
Men
Revoked
Irrevocable
Looked
Seen
Things

More quotes by Amos Oz

Image
That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.
Amos Oz
Image
Now, Israel is a fulfillment, and as a fulfillment, it is flawed. The fact that it is flawed is not so much a testimony about the failures of Israel. No, it is a testimony about the nature of dreams.
Amos Oz
Image
Think about Elizabethan English, where the entire English language behaved pretty much like molten lava, like a volcano in mid-eruption. Modern Hebrew has some things in common with Elizabethan English. It is being reshaped and it's expanding very rapidly in various directions.
Amos Oz
Image
If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.
Amos Oz
Image
I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another.
Amos Oz
Image
Dreams fulfilled are imperfect.
Amos Oz
Image
Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well.
Amos Oz
Image
You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
Amos Oz
Image
In my vocabulary, the word compromise is synonymous to the word life.
Amos Oz
Image
Different musical instruments provide for different music.
Amos Oz
Image
When I say my novels are set in Israel in the last seventy years, this entails the fact that they begin hundreds or thousands of years earlier in time. And, sometimes in very, very different places, because we all come from somewhere, especially here in Israel.
Amos Oz
Image
I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
Amos Oz
Image
I don't think a novel's main donation, main gift, is the document. The document is there, but a novel goes beyond documentation. It goes into opening a new vista, opening a new perspective, showing familiar things in an unfamiliar way, and making the reader reconsider the documentary facts which he or she may have known before.
Amos Oz
Image
All you can see, if you look through the window - everything you see is a fulfillment of dreams, different dreams.
Amos Oz
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm a great believer in compromise. I know it's not popular among young idealists.
Amos Oz
Image
Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
Amos Oz
Image
Israel is a fulfilled dream. Nothing that exists here existed here a hundred years ago.
Amos Oz
Image
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.
Amos Oz