Quotes from Amos Oz

Maybe they feared that a knowledge of languages would expose me too to the blandishments of Europe, that wonderful, murderous continent.

Agnon himself was an observant Jew who kept the Sabbath and wore a skullcap; he was, literally, a God-fearing man: in Hebrew, fear and faith are synonyms. There are corners in Agnon's stories where, in an indirect, cleverly camouflaged way, the fear of God is portrayed as a terrible dread of God: Agnon believes in God and fears him, but he does not love him.

I wanted to go free, to be liberated once and for all from these two enemies, the body and the soul. I wanted to be a cloud. To be a stone on the surface of the moon.

Contending with fanaticism does not mean destroying all fanatics, but rather cautiously handling the little fanatic who hides, more or less, inside each of our souls. It also means ridiculing, just a little, our own convictions; being curious; and trying to take a peek, from time to time, not only through our neighbor's window but, more important, at the reality viewed from that window, which will necessarily be different from the one seen through our own.

What surrounded me did not count. All that counted was made of words.

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".

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.

More and more commonly, the strongest public sentiment is one of profound loathing - subversive loathing of 'the hegemonic discourse,' Western loathing of the East, Eastern loathing of the West, secular loathing of believers, religious loathing of the secular. Sweeping, unmitigated loathing surges like vomit from the depths of this or that misery. Such extreme loathing is a component of fanaticism in all its guises.

Silently and sadly, the village lived its simple life.

All so that for tuition and textbooks they won't be short. It was always like that with Jewish families: they believed that education was an investment in the future, the only thing that no one can ever take away from your children, even if, heaven forbid, there's another war, another revolution, another migration, more discriminatory laws—your diploma you can always fold up quickly, hide it in the seams of your clothes, and run away to wherever Jews are allowed to live.

Really," "really and truly," those code words which barely conceal a lie.)

At the very least literature should not preen itself on mocking us and picking at our wounds, as modern writers in our days do ad nauseam. All they can write is satire, irony, parody (including self-parody), vicious sarcasm, all steeped in malice.