Quotes from Yehuda Amichai

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

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

God has pity on kindergarten children

Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God has pity on kindergarten children.He has less pity on school children.And on grownups he has no pity at all,he leaves them alone,and sometimes they must crawl on all foursin the burning sandto reach the first-aid stationcovered with blood.

Sometimes pus Sometimes a poem. Something always burst out. And always pain.

I stroked your hair in a direction opposite to your journey

My love turns me like a salt sea, it seems, Into sweet drops of autumn's first rain. I'm brought to you slowly as I fall. Take me in. For us there's no angel who will come to redeem. For we are together. Each of us alone.

Il diametro della bomba era di trenta centimetri e il diametro del suo raggio d'azione era di circa sette metri, con quattro morti e undici feriti... E non parliamo nemmeno del pianto degli orfani che si leva fino al trono di Dio e ben oltre, creando un creando un cerchio senza fine e senza Dio.

You got too tired of being an advertisement for our world, so that angels could see: yes it's pretty, earth.

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.

Sometimes I want to lie down on a park bench: that would change my status from Lost Inside to Lost Outside.

As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names like abandoned cemeteries or like an empty history class or a telephone book in a foreign city. And death is when someone behind you keeps calling and calling and you no longer turn around to see who.

And soon, in the coming nights, we will appear, like wandering actors, each in the other's dream and in the dreams of strangers whom we didn't know together.

Even my loves are measured by wars. I say, "That happened after the Second World War." "We met a day before the Six Day War." I would never say "before the peace of '45-'48" or "in the middle of the peace of '56-'67." Yet the knowledge of peace makes its way from one place to another like children's games, which are so much alike everywhere you go.

Eyes sharp as can-openers pried open heavy secrets.

Children mark the eras of my life and the eras of Jerusalem with moon chalk on the street. God's hand in the world.

Where do you feel your soul inside you?" Stretched between my mouth-hole and my asshole, a white thread, not transparent mist, cramped in some corner between two bones, in pain. When it is full it disappears, like a cat.

The rain is speaking quietly, you can sleep now. Near my bed, the rustle of newspaper wings. There are no other angles. I'll wake up early and bribe the coming day to be kind to us.