And I said to myself: That’s true, hope needs to be like barbed wire to keep out despair, hope must be a mine field.
I think the end is endless. It’s either a big black hole or a big white light or both together. But it’s totally meaningless, because even if someone would explain it, I wouldn’t understand it.
And as we stray further from love, we multiply the words. Had we remained together we could have become a silence.
There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games, which are so much alike, everywhere.
The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.
I wanted to be calm, like a mound with all its cities destroyed, and tranquil, like a full cemetery.
The phrase I like to use to describe my sense of time-a play on comparative literature-is comparative time.
Tonight I think again of many days that are sacrificed for one night of love. Of the waste and the fruit of the waste, of plenty and of fire. And how painlessly-time.
God has pity on kindergarten children.
And what will you do now? You’ll collect loves Like stamps. You’ve got doubles and no one Will trade you and you have the damaged ones.
The world of religion isn’t a logical world; that’s why children like it. It’s a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children’s stories or fairy tales.
I’ve often said that all poetry is political. This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality and politics is part of reality, history in the making. Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
I was a very religious child – I went to synagogue at least once, sometimes twice, a day. And I remember my religiousness as good – I think religion is good for children, especially educated children, because it allows for imagination, a whole imaginative world apart from the practical world.
It was not an adventure; it was my life.
Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.
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.
Every intelligent person, whether hes an artist or not – a mathematician, a doctor, a scientist – possesses a poetic way of seeing and describing the world.
I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.
The memory of my father is wrapped up in white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day of work. Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits out of his hat, he drew love from his small body.