Quotes by Israeli Authors - Page 5

I will tell you a story, one I used to tell to a little boy with dark hair. A silent boy who rarely laughs, who listened more closely than I realized. A boy who had a name and not a title
Leigh Bardugo
David looked at me, then, the regret plain on his face. No matter what I said, we both knew the hard truth. We do our best. We try. And usually, it makes no difference at all
Leigh Bardugo
And if Germans do have systematic minds, this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic mother tongue has exhausted their brains' capacity to cope with any further irregularity
Guy Deutscher
ll our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters" from other tongues and cultures.
Amos Oz
Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?
Yuval Noah Harari
Language is mankind's greatest inventiom… that it was never invented.
Guy Deutscher
She’d shown him in a thousand ways that she was honorable and strong and generous and very human, maybe even more vividly human than anyone he’d ever known. And if she was, then Grisha weren’t inherently evil. They were like anyone else—full of the potential to do great good, and also great harm. To ignore that would make Matthias the monster.
Leigh Bardugo
They fear as I once feared you,” he said. “As you once feared me. We are all someone’s monster, Nina
Leigh Bardugo
Consciousness precedes phenomenon, and therefore consciousness can alter phenomenon.
Shai Tubali
Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, the love remaining with itself - this is called Lucifer.
Martin Buber
To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.
Etgar Keret
So you see, we are not free to choose our fate. There is a yoke to be borne and freedom is only an illusion. I am not free. God has put me here on earth for a reason.
Naomi Ragen
The difference between me and Duchi, in one sentence, is this: I say, things will be all right, and if they aren't, that's all right too. Duchi says, things will not be all right, and if they are, that's not all right either. OK, two sentences.
Assaf Gavron
God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and said in Isaiah 54:4-10 (NLT)4 “Fear not; you will no longer live in shame. Don’t be afraid; there is no more disgrace for you.You will no longer remember the shame of your youth and the sorrows of widowhood.5 For your Creator will be your husband; the Lord of Heaven’s Armies is his name!He is your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel, the God of all the earth.6 For the Lord has called you back from your grief— as though you were a young wife abandoned by her husband,” says your God.7 “For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will take you back.8 In a burst of anger I turned my face away for a little while. But with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,” says the Lord, your Redeemer.9 “Just as I swore in the time of Noah that I would never again let a flood cover the earth,so now I swear that I will never again be angry and punish you.10 For the mountains may move and the hills disappear,but even then my faithful love for you will remain. My covenant of blessing will never be broken,” says the Lord, who has mercy on you.
The Prophet Isaiah
The realization that a decline in the moral state impedes the flowering of literature is a feeling unique to the Jewish people. Only we realize in truth that in order to improve the quality of literature, there is a necessary prerequisite, that the writers first cleanse their souls. We feel in ourselves the great need for penitence so that we might rise to the sublime heights of the noble literature that is uniquely ours, that stems from the wisdom of Israel, whose source is holiness and purity, faith and spiritual heroism.- Kook, Lights of Penitence, p. 118.
Rabbi Kook
The fat man looked amused. "What on earth for?" he said. "I never have any contact with writers. If I do, they just keep pestering me about getting paid.
Lavie Tidhar
Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.
Amos Oz
Dad said I had no respect for money and that if I didn't learn when I was little when was I going to learn? Kids who get Bart Simpson dolls at the drop of a hat turn into punks who steal from convenience stores, ‘cos they wind up thinking they can have whatever they want, just like that. So instead of a Bart doll he bought me an ugly porcelain pig with a slot in its back, and now I'll grow up to be okay, now I won't turn into a punk.
Etgar Keret
Of course I'm jealous. I thought I was going to get to punch him. That isn't the point.
Leigh Bardugo
Because I am a doll, and a servant. Because I am a pretty thing and a soldier all the same.
Leigh Bardugo
You cannot make this kind of decision," he said. "Go off with someone you barely know. You're seventeen.""And you're the guy who got drunk on eggnog last Christmas and danced to 'Turn The Beat Around' in Aunt Rachel's wig, so stop acting like you're in charge.""We agreed not to mention that ever again," Jason whispered furiously.
Leigh Bardugo
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.
Yehuda Amichai
Only absolute simplicity can resolve a horrible complication; only a state free from psychology can heal psychological connections, and only a lucid brain can let go of a compulsive thought.
Shai Tubali
I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good.
Leigh Bardugo
if something does go wrong, here is my advice... KEEP CALM and CARRY ON.
Maira Kalman
Walk amongst the natives by day, but in your heart be Superman.
Gene Simmons
Human suffering is caused mainly by ideas, emotions, and thoughts which are the handiwork of the human itself.
Shai Tubali
No matter how small you are or feel or think you are–live big. Yours is the only life of you, in this form, the world will ever have!
Na'ama Yehuda
I’d learned to avoid mirrors. They never seemed to show me what I wanted to see.
Leigh Bardugo
Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life.
Golda Meir
A further, albeit more complex, possibility is that our conscious selves might suffer from characteristic uncertainty about our true values, and gather information about them from choices we make (the Jamesian: "How do I know what I like until I see what I pick").
Tali Sharot
Despise your heart. I wanted to. I didn't want to grieve anymore, to feel loss or guilt, or worry. I wanted to be hard, calculating. I wanted to be fearless.
Leigh Bardugo
Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.
Daniel Kahneman
Experience has taught me that there are some situations in which it's better to keep quiet. That is, I tried to keep quiet. Life gives me good advice, but sometimes I refuse to take it.
Etgar Keret
Me, when it comes to religion, I have no God. When I'm cool, I don't need anyone, and when I'm feeling shitty and this big empty hole opens up inside me, I just know there's never been a god that could fill it and there never will be.
Etgar Keret
In essence, individuals more concerned with portraying their own uniqueness were more likely to select an alcoholic beverage not yet ordered at their table in an effort to demonstrate that they were in fact one of a kind. What these results show is that people are sometimes willing to sacrifice the pleasure they get from a particular consumption experience in order to project a certain image to others. When people order food and drinks, they seem to have two goals: to order what they will enjoy most and to portray themselves in a positive light in the eyes of their friends.
Dan Ariely
Your obstinacy towards your goals gives you ignition which leads to your success.
omer dar
If you have more dreams than achievements-you're young.
Shimon Peres
I think we often hold heroines to an absurd standard. Be brave! Be wise! Always know what's in your heart and speak the truth of it! No and no and no. We fight to be brave. We learn to be wise. We struggle to know ourselves and voice what we want.
Leigh Bardugo
For there is nothing like travel to heal a broken heart.
Daniela I. Norris
When had she stopped being a child? The first time a guy had whistled at her out of a car window when she was walking to school? The moment she started wondering how she looked when she ran, what jiggled or bounced, instead of the pace she was setting? The first time she’d kept from raising her hand because she didn’t want to seem too smart or too eager?
Leigh Bardugo
No more the victory of spirit over matter and definitely not the victory of matter over spirit – the next stage is not one overcoming the other, but a merge.
Shai Tubali
One thing that is clearer to me every day is how much we all have in common, and one of those commonalities is that we all think we are alone.
Liat Segal
Loving each other began with longing, weaving her loneliness into his.
Leah Kaminsky
Visiting new places andmeeting interesting people – even if "What remained after paying the rent for the Tel Aviv flat, which I shared with a roommate, and the tuition at university was close to nothing – it was the experiences that mattered.
Daniela I. Norris
Visiting new places and meeting interesting people – even if "What remained after paying the rent for the Tel Aviv flat, which I shared with a roommate, and the tuition at university was close to nothing – it was the experiences that mattered.
Daniela I. Norris
The two events were probably unrelated, but both jolted Dave the way a sudden air pocket reminds nervous passengers that they’re soaring above the clouds in a pressurized metal tube.
Dan Sofer
It is a hard lesson to learn and a lesson we most of us need to learn at some point: We cannot assume to know a person's history from their face.
Na'ama Yehuda
Many times one is forced to descend to deep, dark regions, in order to find there the greatest, noblest and freest light.
Abraham Isaac Kook
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.
Daniel Kahneman
Are we not, all of us, in some way, damaged mirrors? Are we not constantly engaged in focusing the light of thought—memories out of the depths of human experience—onto the photographic plate of each moment? The image captured in this instant is a snapshot of all eternity, subtly altered by our own brokenness. And who’s to say that the image formed by a damaged mirror is not a truer picture of the universe?
Yael Shahar
The 'Instagram Generation' now experiences the present as an anticipated memory.
Daniel Kahneman
Memory deludes me. I have just remembered something that I completely forgot after it happened. I remembered it again when I was about sixteen, and then I forgot it again. And this morning I remembered not the event itself but the previous recollection, which itself was more than forty years ago, as though an old moon were reflected in a windowpane from which it was reflected in a lake, from where memory draws not the reflection itself, which no longer exists, but only its whitened bones.
Amos Oz
There is a continuity in our lives—a strain of music that flows through it all, unaltered by death or pain. It is true that in the face of pain and death, we are very small. But in the face of life and memory and love, even death is very small.
Yael Shahar
The power of collective memory does not lie in its accurate, systematic, or sophisticated mapping of the past, but in establishing basic images that articulate and reinforce a particular ideological stance.
Yael Zerubavel
He can hum the music in his old man's quivering voice, but he prefers it in his head, where it lives on in violins and reedy winds. If he imagines it in rehearsal he can remember every step of his three-minute solo as if he had danced it only yesterday, but he knows, too, that one time, onstage in Berlin, he had not danced it as he had learned it; this much he knows but cannot recreate, could no recreate it even a moment after he had finished dancing it. While dancing he had felt blind to the stage and audience, deaf to the music. He had let his body do what it needed to do, free to expand and contract in space, to soar and spin. So, accordingly, when he tries to remember the way he danced it on stage, he cannot hear the music or feel his feet or get a sense of the audience. He is embryonic, momentarily cut off from the world around him. The three most important minutes of his life, the ones that determined his fate and future, are the three to which he cannot gain access, ever.
Evan Fallenberg
...here we have the first lesson about the nature of memory: what you wish to forget, you may not be able to. What seems to have died, perhaps is just asleep. On the other hand, sometimes you wish to remember something, and there it stands at the doorway of your consciousness, and refuses to come in. You know you know something, the name of some useless celebrity, perhaps, and yet you cannot fish that name out of your inner aquarium. And this illustrates a critical feature of memory, which resembles, as it turns out, most of the processes in the internal realm: the same cause will regularly yield different, even opposite effects.
Noam Shpancer
Memory is not a storage place but a story we tell ourselves in retrospect. As such, it is made of storytelling materials: embroidery and forgery, perplexity and urgency, revelation and darkness.
Noam Shpancer
The ox feels the yoke, but does the bird feel the weight of its wings?
Leigh Bardugo
My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.
Maira Kalman