YEHUDA AMICHAI

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It was not an adventure; it was my life.

Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

What are you going to do now? You'll collect loves like stamps. You've got doubles and no one will trade with you. And you've got damaged ones.

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

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.

God has pity on kindergarten children

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

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

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

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

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.

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

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.