Writing in the Dark Quotes

“I write. I imagine. The act of imagining in itself enlivens me. I am not frozen and paralyzed before the predator. I invent characters. At times I feel as if I am digging up people from the ice in which reality enshrouded them, but maybe, more than anything else, it is myself that I am now digging up.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“I write. I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world. In a sense, I make it mine. In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home. By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable. Also, when I describe the impermeable arbitrariness that signs my destiny — arbitrariness at the hands of a human being, or arbitrariness at the hands of fate — I suddenly discover new nuances, subtleties. I discover that the mere act of writing about arbitrariness allows me to feel a freedom of movement in relation to it. That by merely facing up to arbitrariness I am granted freedom — maybe the only freedom a man may have against any arbitrariness: the freedom to put your tragedy into your own words. The freedom to express yourself differently, innovatively, before that which threatens to chain and bind one to arbitrariness and its limited, fossilizing definitions.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“I write, and I feel how the correct and precise use of words is sometimes like a remedy to an illness. Like a contraption for purifying the air, I breathe in and exhale the murkiness and manipulations of linguistic scoundrels and language rapists of all shades and colors. I write and I feel how the tenderness and intimacy I maintain with language, with its different layers, its eroticism and humor and soul, give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by the conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“Because even after fifty-six years of independent sovereignty, still the earth trembles beneath Israel's feet. Israel has not yet managed to establish among its citizens the sense that this place is their home. They may feel that Israel is their fortress, but still not truly their home.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“I fear that after decades of spending most of our energies, our thoughts and attention and inventiveness, our blood and our life and our financial means, on protecting our external borders, fortifying and safeguarding them more and more—after all this, we may be very close to becoming like a suit of armor that no longer contains a knight, no longer contains a human. Moreover, I often think that even if this longed-for peace reaches our region tomorrow, in some sense it will already be too late. Because the qualities and the viewpoints and the behaviors that the violence has formulated in us, Israelis and Palestinians, will continue to work their ways on us for many more years. They will not be quick to disintegrate in our bloodstream, both private and national, and they will keep on poisoning our souls, sabotaging the possibility of maintaining a stable peace. Time after time, they will sweep us away and cause us to replay all the same old ills, which will, in turn, create more and more waves of violence.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“The violence in which we have been living for so long acts naturally and incessantly to turn human beings into faceless, one-dimensional creatures lacking volition. Wars, armies, regimes, and fanatic religions try to blur the nuances that create personal, private uniqueness, the nonrecurrent wonder of each and every person, and attempt to turn people into a mass, into a horde, so that they may be better “suited” to their purposes and to the entire situation. Literature—and not necessarily any particular book, but the attentiveness engendered by direct, profound, “complex literature—reminds us of our duty to demand for ourselves—from the “situation”—the right to individuality and uniqueness. It helps us to reclaim some of the things that this “situation” tries relentlessly to expropriate: the subtle, discerning application to the person trapped in the conflict, whether friend or foe; the complex nuances of relationships between people and between different communities; the precision of words and descriptions; the flexibility of thought; the ability and the courage to occasionally change the point of view in which we are frozen (sometimes fossilized); the deep and essential understanding that we can—we must—read every human situation from several different points of view.

Then we may be able to reach the place in which the totally contradictory stories of different people, different nations, even sworn enemies, may coexist and play out together. This is the place where we are finally able to grasp that in true negotiations, our wishes will be forced to encounter the Other’s, forced to recognize their justness, their legitimacy. This is the moment when we feel the sharp growing pains that always attend the arrival of sobriety, and in this case the realization that there is a limit to our ability to mold reality so that it perfectly suits only our own needs. This is the moment when we feel what I called earlier “the principle of Otherness,” whose deep-seated meaning, if you wish, is the rightful existence, the stories, pains, and hopes, of the Other. If we can only reach this Archimedean point, we can begin to dismantle the barriers and detonators that prevent us from solving the conflict.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“I feel the heavy price that I and the people around me pay for this prolonged state of war. Part of this price is a shrinking of our soul's surface area - those parts of us that touch the violent, menacing world outside - and a diminished ability and willingness to empathize at all with other people in pain. We also pay the price by suspending our moral judgment, and we give up on understanding what we oursleves think. Given a situation so frightening, so deceptive, and so complicated - both morally and practically - we feel it may be better not to think or know. Better to hand over the job of thinking and doing and setting moral standards to those who are surely "in the know". Better not to feel too much until the crisis ends - and if it never ends, at least we'll have suffered a little less, developed a useful dullness, protected ourselves as much as we could with a little indiference, a little repression, a little deliberate blindness, and a large dose of self-anesthetics.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics

“Dice Sartre en el ensayo «¿Por qué escribir?»: «Nadie podría imaginar ni por un momento que pudiera escribirse un libro ensalzando el antisemitismo, por ejemplo. Nadie puede exigirme, desde el momento en que siento que mi libertad está indisolublemente ligada a la de todos los demás, que utilice esta libertad para estar de acuerdo con la esclavitud de algunos. Así pues, el escritor —tanto si es ensayista, panfletista, artista o novelista, como si habla exclusivamente de los sentimientos del hombre como individuo o se opone al régimen social—, un ser libre que se dirige a otros seres libres, tiene un único tema: la libertad».”
― David Grossman, Escribir en la oscuridad

“Das gute Buch macht den Menschen einzigartig und befreit ihm aus der Menge. Es gibt ihm die Möglichkeit zu spüren, wie aus unbekannten Regionen Seeleninhalte, Erinnerungen und Existenzmöglichkeiten in ihm auftauchen und an die Oberfläche steigen, die ihm allein gehören und nur ihm. Die ausschließlich die Frucht seiner Persönlichkeit sind. Das Ergebnis seiner intimsten Schlussfolgerungen. Denn im alltäglichen Leben, in der Vulgarität des Alltags, in der allgemeinen Beschmutzung des Intellekts, der flachen, undifferenzierten Sprache, haben diese Seelenstoffe es schwer, aus jenen inneren Tiefen aufzusteigen und zu Wort zu kommen.”
― David Grossman, Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics