Quotes from Meir Shalev

Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there.

A homing pigeon must love her home; otherwise she will not wish to return to it.

The note in the quill was intended for the girl, and it read, 'Yes and yes and yes.' Yes I love you, yes I miss you, and yes I know and remember that you do, too. For in her last missive she had written 'No and no.' That is to say, No I do not want anyone other than you, and no I do not manage to sleep at night.

A woman has to look good, but a man—a little bit nicer looking than a monkey is enough.

That's true freedom for a person. Not money, but time.

Mine is the tongue tied silence of awkwardness, hers the smiling silence of anticipation, and then we utter inanities to each other, like "beautiful weather arranged for us" and "I like these kind of clouds.

What does a person need?' she proclaimed one day after the first spoonful of dessert. 'Not much: something sweet to eat, and a story to tell, and time and space, and gladioluses in a vase, and two friends, and two hilltops, one on which to stand and the other upon which to gaze. And two eyes for watching the heavens and waiting....

My mother left home in the manner that characterized everything she did: with a decision that swelled and ripened slowly and once made could be rescinded by no one. She would sit at the kitchen table with a large sheet of paper that she would divide into two columns. At the top of one she would write FOR and at the top of the other AGAINST...She made her lists, counted on her fingers, and made her decision only after tabulating and weighing.

Tizrah split each fig and gave one half to me while she bit into the other half. She explained that every fig tastes different from the next, even if they grew on the same tree. "Meshulam told me it isn't nice if someone gets a good fig and someone else gets a rotten one, so you have to split every fig between the people eating them.

In such situations it is a good idea to divide hope into small bits of reality, not to expect a huge miracle at the end of the road but to wish for the grace of the few feet just ahead.

If only we could get rid of every dead thing inside our own bodies and souls!

The rabbis of the Talmud opined that Saul failed as a leader because there were no scandals in his past, that he lacked skeletons in his closet to keep him wary. By that measure, our leaders of today are brilliantly qualified, but it seems to me that Saul's failure came from elsewhere. He failed because Samuel and David wounded him fatally, not only by their actions but by their presence, by their very nature and his.

In spite of this, he will reach his heart's desire with wondrous precision.

But a child who learns things like this at the age of four will be a better person when he or she reaches the age of six, and you cannot underestimate a chance like that.