46 Quotes by Yehuda Amichai

Try to remember some details. For the worldis filled with people who were torn from their sleepwith no one to mend the tear,and unlike wild beasts they liveeach in his lonely hiding place and they dietogether on battlefieldsand in hospitals.And the earth will swallow all of them,good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,all of them in their rebellion against death,their mouths open till the last moment,praising and cursing in a singlehowl. Try, tryto remember some details.

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.

Now and then, I remember you in timesUnbelievable. And in places not made for memoryBut for the transient, the passing that does not remain.

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

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.