The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai Quotes

“A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.
”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Look, just as time isn't inside clocks
love isn't inside bodies:
bodies only tell the love.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Last to dry was the hair.
When we were already far from the sea,
when words and salt, which had merged on us,
separated from one another with a sigh,
and your body no longer showed
signs of a terrible ancientness.
And in vain we had forgotten a few things on the beach,
so that we would have an excuse to return.
We didn’t return.
And these days I remember the days
that have your name on them, like a name on a ship,
and how we saw through two open doors
one man who was thinking, and how we looked at the clouds
with the ancient gaze we inherited from our fathers,
who waited for rain,
and how at night, when the world cooled off,
your body kept its warmth for a long time,
like the sea”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Like a butcher sharpening knife on knife
I sharpen heart on heart inside me.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“My girlfriend forgot her love on the sidewalk
like a bicycle. All night outside, in the dew.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“People caught in a homeland-trap:
to speak now in this weary language,
a language that was torn from its sleep in the Bible: dazzled,
it wobbles from mouth to mouth. In a language that once described
miracles and God, to say car, bomb, God.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“If only it were possible to grasp the moment
when two people first become strangers to each other.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“I don't drink wine; but everything the wine doesn't do to me
is a black abyss without drunkenness, a dark
empty vineyard where they tread and bruise the soles of
their feet on the hard stone.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Sometimes I want to lie down on a park bench:
that would change my status
from Lost Inside to
Lost Outside.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“I stroked your hair in a direction opposite to your journey”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“already she drew in the sand
with her big toe:
King Solomon, as though
he were a rubber ball, an
apocalyptic, bearded herring, an
imperial walking-stick, an
amalgam, half chicken
and half Solomon.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Jerusalem, the only city in the world
where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“I tried
to go out into my time and to know, but I couldn't get any farther
than the body of the woman beside me.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“I'm like a rifle that's a little out of date
but very accurate: when I love,
there's a strong recoil, back to childhood, and it hurts.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“We begged you, Lord, to divide right from wrong
and instead you divided the waters above the firmament
from those beneath it. We begged
for the knowledge of good and evil, and you gave us
all kinds of rules and regulations
like the rules of soccer”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Now all I know how to do
is to grow dark in the evening. I'm happy
with what I've got. And all I wish to say is
my name and address, and perhaps my father's name,
like a prisoner of war
who, according to the Geneva Convention,
is not required to say a single word more.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“The sun thought that Jerusalem was a sea
and set in her: a terrible mistake.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“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.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“You got too tired of being an advertisement
for our world, so that angels could see: yes it's pretty, earth.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“A friend of mine tells a story about some Israeli students who were called up in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As soon as they were notified, they went back to their rooms at University, and each packed his gear, a rifle, and a book of Yehuda Amichai’s poems.”
― Chana Bloch, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Children mark the eras of my life
and the eras of Jerusalem
with moon chalk on the street.
God’s hand in the world.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“Eyes sharp as can-openers
pried open heavy secrets.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow in 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 plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

“My father built over me a worry big as a shipyard
and I left it once, before I was finished,
and he remained there with his big, empty worry.”
― Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai