Yehuda Amichai Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.

Every intelligent person, whether he's an artist or not - a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist - possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.

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.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

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.

The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature-is comparative time.

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.

The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning,

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.

God has pity on kindergarten children

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.

Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.

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.

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.

Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children's games, which are so much alike, everywhere.

Here (Jerusalem), tears do not weaken the eyes, they only polish and shine the hardness of faces like stone.

And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.

I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.

It was not an adventure; it was my life.

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.

Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

Love is like a reservoir of kindness and pleasure, like silos and pools during a siege.

From the place where we are right, flowers will not grow in the spring.

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.