Quotes from Amos Oz

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.

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.

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

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.

Há boas e más novas no café. A má, é que o tempo corre. A boa, é que o tempo cura.

This is the anarchist core, the rebellious gene that has flickered for thousands of years in Jewish culture. We don't just follow orders. We want justice, and we demand it even from the Creator.

Fanaticism ... is contagious: a person may catch it even as he fights to cure other people of it. There is no shortage of anti-fanaticism fanatics in the world. All sorts of crusades to stop jihad, and jihads to subjugate the new crusaders. This includes the zeal so prevalent in Israel and in the West these days to deliver a knockout blow that will finish off all the bloodthirsty fanatics and anyone like them once and for all. To eradicate every last bastion of zealotry.

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.

I realised at the age of 16 that unless I read the gospels, I would never have access to Renaissance art, to the music of Bach or the novels of Dostoevsky. So in the evenings, when the other boys went to play basketball or chase girls - I had no chance in either - I found my comfort in Jesus.

The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.

I have almost never written about my experience as a soldier on the battlefield, because I tried, and I found that it is beyond my capacity to describe the battlefield. The battlefield consists mostly of smells, and it is very difficult to describe smells in words - very difficult indeed.

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