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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.

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
Real
History
Response
Writing
Often
Poet
Reflects
Even
House
Sitting
Writes
Political
Poetry
Tea
Reality
Deal
Poems
Part
Deals
Glass
Human
Politics
Glasses
Humans
Making
Drinking

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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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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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Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.
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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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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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It was not an adventure it was my life.
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From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.
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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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I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
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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.
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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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The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
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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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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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There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
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The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.
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Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.
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