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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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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
Revoked
Irrevocable
Looked
Seen
Things
Men

More quotes by Amos Oz

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We supporters of the two-state solution in Israel and Palestine are now under a fierce attack from the far right and from the far left in Israel and in Europe. If I were a paranoid, I would say that maybe the far left and the far right are coordinating a conspiracy.
Amos Oz
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Over 70 years after Hitler, a German chancellor, a woman, is the leader of the free world. So don't talk to me about irrevocable.
Amos Oz
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The opposite of compromise is not integrity. The opposite of compromise is not idealism. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.
Amos Oz
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Not now, for the last three thousand years, Hebrew has been penetrated and fertilized by ancient Semitic languages - by Aramaic, by Greek, by Latin, by Arabic, by Yiddish, by Latino, by German, by Russian, by English, I could go on and on. It's very much like English.
Amos Oz
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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
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I would not waste five years of my life in order to send to the Israeli readers a simple message such as, Let us change a policy or stop the settlements, Or, Let us strive for peace. This is not what it is about.
Amos Oz
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Literature may make the reader reexamine some of his or her own conventions, look at himself or herself in a different way, look at others in a different way. This goes way beyond just making statements or manifesting principles.
Amos Oz
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I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
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There are certain concepts, which exist in english, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa.
Amos Oz
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When people have peace, they hate it and long for excitement, and when they have excitement, they want peace.
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 Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.
Amos Oz
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Words create conceptions and self-conceptions and ultimately nations. They can start and stop wars. They can would and heal. Choosing words carefully is a moral responsibility.
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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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
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I don't believe in binational states. There are wonderful examples of this, prosperous multinational states: Switzerland, Switzerland and Switzerland. Everywhere else - be it Cyprus, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, it ended in a terrible bloodbath.
Amos Oz
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I often write about reconciling. Reconciling, or maybe half-reconciling between antagonists, between people who are deadly enemies. I write about reconciliation, but not as a miracle, as a slow, gradual process of mutual discovery - discovering one another. I write about sad, sober, sometimes heart-breaking compromises.
Amos Oz
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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
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Israel has obviously not liberated the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. We have occupied them, but we have not liberated them.
Amos Oz
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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragedy it is a clash between right and right. And, therefore it's not black and white. Sometimes, recently it is indeed a clash between wrong and wrong. It is not as simple as fascism was.
Amos Oz