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Amos Oz Quotes

Amos Oz is an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist and intellectual. He is also a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. He is regarded as Israel's most famous living author.

Oz's work has been published in 42 languages in 43 countries, and has received many honours and awards, among them the Legion of Honour of France, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Israel Prize. In 2007, a selection from the Chinese translation of A Tale of Love and Darkness was the first work of modern Hebrew literature to appear in an official Chinese textbook.

Since 1967, Oz has been a prominent advocate of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

✵ 4. May 1939 – 28. December 2018
Amos Oz photo

Works

A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz: 12 quotes56 likes

Famous Amos Oz Quotes

“If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness

“Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.”

Amos Oz

“Love is a curious mixture of opposites, a blend of extreme selfishness and total devotion. A paradox! Besides which, love, everybody is always talking about love, love, but love isn't something you choose, you catch it like a disease, you get trapped in it, like a disaster.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness

“There are lots of women who are attracted to tyrannical men. Like moths to a flame. And there are some women who do not need a hero or even a stormy lover but a friend. Just remember that when you grow up. Steer clear of the tryant lovers, and try to locate the ones who are looking for a man as a friend, not because they are feeling empty themselves but because they enjoy making you full too. And remember that friendship between a woman and a man is something much more precious and rare than love: love is actually something quite gross and even clumsy compared to friendship. Friendship includes a measure of sensitivity, attentiveness, generosity, and a finely tuned sense of moderation.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness

“When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

Source: A Tale of Love and Darkness

“Out there, in the world, all the walls were covered with graffiti: 'Yids, go back to Palestine,' so we came back to Palestine, and now the worldatlarge [sic] shouts at us: 'Yids, get out of Palestine.”

Amos Oz book A Tale of Love and Darkness

A Tale of Love and Darkness (2003). <br class="br">Quoted on U.S. radio program &quot; Fresh Air http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4195061&quot; (December 1, 2004).

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a tragedy, a clash between one very powerful, very convincing, very painful claim over this land and another no less powerful, no less convincing claim. Now such a clash between right claims can be resolved in one of two manners. There's the Shakespeare tradition of resolving a tragedy with the stage hewed with dead bodies and justice of sorts prevails. But there is also the Chekhov tradition. In the conclusion of the tragedy by Chekhov, everyone is disappointed, disillusioned, embittered, heartbroken, but alive. And my colleagues and I have been working, trying…not to find the sentimental happy ending, a brotherly love, a sudden honeymoon to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, but a Chekhovian ending, which means clenched teeth compromise.”

Amos Oz

From a PBS interview with Amos Oz. The entire interview http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june02/oz_1-23.html

“The minute we leave south Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the State of Israel versus Hezbollah was sheer folly from the outset. It most certainly no longer will be relevant when Israel returns to her internationally recognized northern border.”

Amos Oz

"Try a Little Tenderness" (interview) in Ha'aretz, March 17, 2000.

Amos Oz Quotes about people

“The kibbutz way of life is not for everyone. It is meant for people who are not in the business of working harder than they should be working, in order to make more money than they need, in order to buy things they don't really want, in order to impress people they don't really like.”

Amos Oz

&quot;The Great Disruption&quot;, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 17 Jun 1999, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00545kh

“The [political] left are people with an imagination and the right are those without an imagination.”

Amos Oz

"Between Oz and Ayalon" (interview), the Supplement to Shabbat, 21 November 2008, Yedioth Ahronoth, p. 2.

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