“The fish,Even in the fisherman's net,Still carries,The smell of the sea.”

“You look out of the car window on your right and are surprised to find that the narrow, worn strip that carries you has turned into a wide, smooth elegant road. The asphalt shines, and soon it separates out, rising to a hill with classy building, and you realize it leads to a settlement.”

“It is easy to blur the truth with a simple linguistic trick: start your story from "Secondly." Yes, this is what Rabin did. He simply neglected to speak of what happened first. Start your story with "Secondly," and the world will be turned upside-down. Start your story with "Secondly," and the arrows of the Red Indians are the original criminals and the guns of the white men are entirely the victims. It is enough to start with "Secondly," for the anger of the black man against the white to be barbarous. Start with "Secondly," and Gandhi becomes responsible for the tragedies of the British.”

“In my despair I rememberthat there is life after death;there is life after deathand I have no problem.But I ask:Oh my God,is there life before death?”

“I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history, personal and public history. But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, to attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.”

“Death is like a fisherman who has caught a fish in his net and leaves it for a time in the water: the fish still swims about, but the net surrounds it, and the fisherman will take it when he wishes.”

“A true book is like a net, and words are the mesh. The nature of the mesh matters relatively little. What matters is the live catch the fisherman draws up from the depths of the sea, the flashings of silver that we see gleam within the net.”