A. B. Yehoshua Quotes

Intimate relationships are a gold mine for literature to explore, to understand, to describe.

We always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned?

Since ideology is part of the human personality, it deserves a place in the kingdom of eternal truths.

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.

I don't think that when Zionism began there was a claim that we were losing - even in part - our capacity to contribute to other peoples.

So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, there's never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.

Yet in recent years I have witnessed a new phenomenon among filmgoers, especially those considered intelligent and perceptive. I have a name for this phenomenon: the Instant White-out. People are closeted in cozy darkness; they turn off their mobile phones and willingly give themselves, for ninety minutes or two hours, to a new film that got a fourstar rating in the newspaper. They follow the pictures and the plot, understand what is spoken either in the original tongue or via dubbing or subtitles, enjoy lush locations and clever scenes, and even if they find the story superficial or preposterous, it is not enough to pry them from their seats and make them leave the theatre in the middle of the show.
But something strange happens. After a short while, a week or two, sometimes even less, the film is whitened out, erased, as if it never happened. They can't remember its name, or who the actors were, or the plot. The movie fades into the darkness of the movie house, and what remains is at most a ticket stub left accidentally in one's pocket.

We must see what in the Israeli identity - in the Israeli - we can give to other people rather than speaking so often of taking, expanding territory.