Yehuda Amichai quotes
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“Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (2013). “The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai”, p.54, Univ of California Press
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“Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (2013). “The Selected Poetry Of Yehuda Amichai”, p.95, Univ of California Press
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“Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games, which are so much alike, everywhere.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“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 AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (2006). “Open Closed Open: Poems”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“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 -
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“The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : "Amichai, Israel´s Most Important and Influential Poet, Dies at 76". www.nytimes.com. September 22, 2000.
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“There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
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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 -
“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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.”
-- 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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“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.”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (2013). “The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai”, p.152, Univ of California Press
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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.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
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“God has pity on kindergarten children”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (2013). “The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai”, p.18, Univ of California Press
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“It was not an adventure; it was my life.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (1992). “Poems of Jerusalem ; And, Love Poems: A Bilingual Edition”
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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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“And what will you do now? You'll collect loves Like stamps. You've got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.”
-- Yehuda Amichai -
“The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning,”
-- Yehuda AmichaiSource : Yehuda Amichai (2006). “Open Closed Open: Poems”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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