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

More quotes by Yehuda Amichai

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Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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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 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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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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I think the end is endless. It's either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it's totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn't understand it.
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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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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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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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I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.
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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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I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
Yehuda Amichai
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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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The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning.
Yehuda Amichai
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God has pity on kindergarten children
Yehuda Amichai
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The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature - is comparative time.
Yehuda Amichai
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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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Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.
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Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.
Yehuda Amichai
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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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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.
Yehuda Amichai