Quotes from Yehuda Amichai

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 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 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.

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.

And what will you do now? You'll collect loves Like stamps. You've got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.

I know a man who photographed the view he saw from the window of the room where he made love and not the face of the woman he loved there.

People use each other as a healing for their pain. They put each other on their existential wound, on the eye, on the cunt, on mouth and open hand. They hold each other and won't let go.

Look, just as time isn't inside clocks love isn't inside bodies: bodies only tell the love.

Sometimes I come crashing down inside myself without anyone noticing.

In my life are many windows and many graves. Sometimes they exchange roles: then a window is closed forever, then by way of a gravestone I can see very far. (Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager)

It was not an adventure; it was my life.

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

Yes, all of this is sorrow. But leave a little love burning always like the small bulb in the room of a sleeping baby that gives him a bit of security and quiet love though he doesn't know what the light is or where it comes from.

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.

When you smile, serious ideas get exhausted. At night the mountains keep quiet beside you, in the morning the sand goes with you down to the beach. When you do nice things to me all the heavy industries shut down.

To live is to build a ship and a harbor at the same time. And to complete the harbor long after the ship was drowned.

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.

But peace returns to my heart. Not peace as it used to be before it left me years ago. It went away to school, matured as I did, and came back looking like me.

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.

Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife I sharpen heart on heart inside me.

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

After you left me I had a bloodhound sniff at my chest and my belly. Let it fill its nostrils and set out to find you. I hope it will find you and rip your lover's balls to shreds and bite off his cock— or at least bring me one of your stockings between its teeth.

The echo of a great love is like the echo of a huge dog's barking in an empty Jerusalem house marked for demolition.

From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring. The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard. But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined House once stood.