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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.

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
White
Arab
Black
Israel
World
Indeed
Western
Case
Europe
Saying
Movie
Palestine

More quotes by Amos Oz

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I recommend the art of slow reading.
Amos Oz
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The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. All of them take place in Israel - in Jerusalem, in the desert, in the kibbutz, in small towns, in villages.
Amos Oz
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Recently with IS and Islamist fanaticism, it has become easy for the Israeli government to simply push the Palestinian struggle for self-determination into the same ranks as these fundamentalist movements.
Amos Oz
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You know, gynecology has a role sex is a gift. And literature is not about sending messages.
Amos Oz
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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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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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Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
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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My dream for Israel is peace, external and internal peace.
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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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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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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This bloody conflict has been going on for much too long. It is doing terrible things to Israelis, to Palestinians. One of the terrible things it is causing is indifference.
Amos Oz
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All of my novels are democracies.
Amos Oz
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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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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
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Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?
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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The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.
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