59 quotes
you could always tell a man's calling by his dress.
Twilight and Other Stories (1992)
Hebrew, you know, is truly untranslatable.
Interview (1985)
The so-called Arab-Israeli conflict-that is, the problem of the territories and their population-is one of the last remaining conflicts, and one of the most superfluous. It can be resolved. Not by love: by accord.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the history of two societies in extreme distress: anyone who speaks only of the anguish of the Israelis is not telling the whole truth, nor is anyone who speaks only of the misery of the Palestinians.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
Jerusalem-which sometimes feels like the frontline of an ongoing war
Interview (1985)
I held on to the parapet and breathed hard. A fierce desire had come and gone and left me reeling.
Twilight and Other Stories (1992)
The sounds of a small city. As small as a man's palm. (chapter 2 p22)
City of Many Days (1972)
The question remains: aside from a great writer, or a writer-historian of Barbara Tuchman's stature, who can draw an accurate picture of the situation and not enrage those who were there? Who can highlight the distress of both sides, without betraying either one?
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
To this day our language has kept its stony, concentrated, concise character, striving for the essential. This makes Hebrew practically untranslatable; a phrase of three words in Hebrew becomes a phrase of eighteen words in French, so you can imagine what it does to poetry.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
The ways of the world began to turn upside down about one hour after sunrise. (first line of "Prophet")
Cultural change that enables people to think in terms of cooperation, rather than enmity and strife, is the conceptual change from the language and state of mind of a closed agrarian society, the forerunner of the nation-state, to that of an open technological one.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
My feeling is that at our present stage of Judaism, knowledge and creation within the culture have come to replace ceremony, just as ceremony and prayer, in their time, came to replace the sacrifices.
Interview (1985)
The peace must not be seen as a peace of industrialists and yuppies; it must not be seen as a peace between people in suits who have Philippine maids, on the backs of, and over the heads of those who are referred to too clinically as the “lower tenth percentiles”—in simple Hebrew, the have-nots.
On the Jerusalem Bus at 7 AM: 'Where is our peace? (1996)
To a certain extent, all writing is working within tradition: we use idioms, linguistic connections, and associations known to our tribe, because we cannot go outside language, and languages are tribal affairs.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
Writing, real writing, has very little to do with so-called typical behavior. It must be whittled down from our familiar spheres of reference to what the person actually is and does; in good writing, no person is "typical."
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
In charismatic relationships there is no responsibility, only guilt; in more developed relationships, responsibility is present. With charisma there is no "other"; everyone is part of one familial porridge, a publis pabulum. Anyone outside of it is an enemy.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)
She no longer sought fortune-tellers, but relied on herself, on her own two arms, as if she had only now discovered their true strength to support. To sustain. (chapter 9 p180)
City of Many Days (1972)
A profound weariness was reflected in his eyes, a sorrow intermittently replenished; he was like a boxer's old punching bag, still suffering blow after blow, still returning to the hand that struck it.
Twilight and Other Stories (1992)
If we insist on absolute justice, the reckoning of lives will never end. All we can talk about is beneficial justice, beneficial for both sides-that is, a territorial compromise and the continuation of the conflict at the negotiating table.
The Vocabulary of Peace: Life, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East (1995)