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And I said to myself: That's true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.

Yehuda Amichai

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Yehuda Amichai
Age: 76 †
Born: 1924
Born: May 3
Died: 2000
Died: September 22
Educator
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Translator
Writer
Kreisfreie Stadt Würzburg
Hope
Keep
Barbed
True
Wire
Must
Field
Needs
Despair
Like
Mines
Mine
Fields

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There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
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And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.
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My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time.
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I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.
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Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.
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From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.
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I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
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I've often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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I’ve never been in those places where I’ve never been and never will be, I have no share in the infinity of light-years and dark-years, but the darkness is mine, and the light, and my time is my own.
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The world of religion isn't a logical world that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.
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Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.
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Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.
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Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.
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What are you going to do now? You'll collect loves like stamps. You've got doubles and no one will trade with you. And you've got damaged ones.
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A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.
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The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.
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The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.
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Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games, which are so much alike, everywhere.
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I was a very religious child - I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good - I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.
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