Quotes from Amos Oz

A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops.

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

Healing begins with you're saying these simple words to your adversary, yes, to your enemy: "You're hurting, I know. I'm hurting, too. Let's try to find a way".

One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.

L'amore è una faccenda intima strana e piena di contraddizioni, visto che non di rado amiamo qualcuno solo perchè amiamo noi stessi, per egoismo, avidità, desiderio fisico, brama di dominare l'oggetto d'amore e asservirlo; o al contrario, per desiderio di asservirci e essere dominati dal nostro amante, e in fondo l'amore assomiglia all'odio e gli è più prossimo di quanto non si pensi normalmente.

Being conformist and respectful as I was of the grown-up world and its prevailing values, and having no brothers or sisters or friends to counterbalance the personality cult that surrounded me, I had no alternative but to concur, humbly but thoroughly, with the grown-ups' opinion of me.

Curiosity and imagination are bound together. The age-old human urge to peek behind other people's drawn shutters, the eagerness to compare one's own intimate secrets with the secret intimacy of others, is an urge that may serve as an antidote to the fanatic's lust to murder the difference between himself and others. Or to kill anyone who refuses to change and declines to be exactly like him.

You cannot write without looking behind you; like Lot's wife. And in doing so you turn yourself and them into blocks of salt.

He wrote more or less the same way as he dreamed or masturbated: a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust, and wretchedness. And in those days he also had an insatiable curiosity to try to understand why people hurt each other, and themselves, without meaning to at all.

The fanatic is always in a hurry to fall on your neck to save you, because he loves you. He loves you unconditionally. But, conversely, he might grab you and strangle you if he discovers that you are beyond redemption. Lost. And if that is the case, he is obliged to hate you and rid the world of you.

Silently and sadly, the village lived its simple life.

This war is being fought between fanatics convinced that their ends sanctify all means, and everyone else - all those who hold that life is an end and not a means. It is a struggle between people who believe that justice, whatever that term may mean to them, is more important than life, and those who maintain that life takes precedence over other values.