David Grossman Quotes & Sayings

Again, her singing was her only absolute, the only thing that was completely her. a thousand classes hadn't given her this concrete insight: her voice was her place in the world, the home she leaves in the morning and returns to at night, in which she can be herself in her entirety and hope to be loved for all that she is and in spite of all she is. — David Grossman

Tamar noticed that she had never met a person she felt so comfortable being silent with. — David Grossman

The passing time is painful. I have lost the art of moving simply, naturally, within it. I am swept back against its flow. Angry, vindictive, it pierces me all the time, all the time with its spikes. — David Grossman

We write. How fortunate we are: The world does not close in on us. The world does not grow smaller. — David Grossman

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

The book should betray me, in the sense that it should take me to places I am afraid to go — David Grossman

She breathes as if he had held her hand and helped her jump over the chasm of that scar. — David Grossman

And I discovered my limitations, and mainly I learned that there was a price to pay for that childhood (it turns out there's no such thing as a free starvation), and that in the meantime the world had filled up with other children who hadn't wasted all their strength on just surviving but had simply grown and opened and deepened, and that only in her innocent eyes could I still be considered worth anything. — David Grossman

And he, in his way, talked with her about everything, and shared with her everything, he thought would not be too painful for her, even though she was gladly willing to pay the pain levy, which was sometimes unbearable, only so that he would not for a moment stop the flow of his talk with her, so he would not filter or protect her or think twice. — David Grossman

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

Only now, in rhythmic waves, was she struck by her stupidity, her blindness, her estheronautiness, and, above all, her longing, the insult of the power of her longing, and she knew very well that is was these shortcomings that had made her so eager to interweave in his story the threads of her secret dreams of candor and of painful, purifying honesty; of a generous togetherness in which everything was possible. For a moment, with all that had been spun and stabbed and defiled within her, her face took on the expression of a frightened, abandoned girl who lunges out to bite, who lives unimaginably close to the skin's surface, ready to be drawn out like a final plan of retreat. — David Grossman

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him. — David Grossman

I would almost plead for a pinprick of salvation, to pierce the burden, the damned skin of words wrapped around me. — David Grossman

Telling secrets to a writer is like embracing a pickpocket. — David Grossman

And then my grandfather explained -in his language- that utopias are not for mortals. And that people are like flies, that the stories they are told must be like flypaper. Utopias are gold-covered paper, he said, and flypaper is covered in everything man secretes from his body and his life. Especially the suffering. And our hope is that its measure is the measure of man, and forgiveness. — David Grossman

It is a journey to the language that can describe what is so hard to utter. — David Grossman

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

You describe your reality in the highest resolution even when it's a nightmare and in doing so, you live your own life, not a cliche others have formulated for you. — David Grossman

And there will be a time, not for long, a month is enough, or a week, when every single person will be able to completely fulfill what they were meant to be - everything their bodies and souls have offered them, not what other people have dumped on them. — David Grossman

And this book was an attempt to be with these feelings, also to find a place that will allow both to remember all the time without dying of it and to forget without killing. — David Grossman

Now
she reached down that far, she submerged her filthy self, full of choked cries, of loneliness and poison, until she felt it rising up. It was being pulled out, saved from herself
and she was rising along with it, slowly: who she was now, what she had lost in the past year, and what was growing, slowly, inside her, in spite of everything. — David Grossman

She had not known how to tell him that his loving whispers were always in her ears, like a story she'd been told, the story of a thing she did not deserve. But he understood. He called those thoughts "the baby teeth of a snake," and swore he would rip them out of her, and pledged to prove to her that the opposite was true. And he didn't even have to explain to her what he meant by "the opposite"; she knew it was the opposite of her. — David Grossman

How could she be feeling the very same streams that rushed around within him? She thought, as they overflowed and lapped inside her too. She had never felt the inside of another person this way. — David Grossman

I like to do things that frighten me. When I'm afraid, I understand more things. I want the feeling... All my instincts cry out against it, every morning anew. Then I say, 'I should do it. If I don't do it, no one will do it for me. — David Grossman

Then a calm fell upon him. The gushing began from all sorts of places, all over his body. He heard pleasurable little giggles on the outer edges of his mind, in the dark creases behind his thoughts. He felt good, better than he'd felt in years. As if he were inside a huge embrace. And he felt as if he had finally reached the right place, his home, his motherland. — David Grossman

Something has fallen asleep there, that's all, but it's warm, and it's hers, it's the pain imprinted on her, and his healing powers rise up. It's her with everything she now is. — David Grossman

Today the data linking violence in the media to violence in society are superior to those linking cancer and tobacco. — David Grossman

There is
breath
there
is breath
inside the pain
there is breath — David Grossman

He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out. — David Grossman

The primary urge that motivates and engenders writing ... is the writer's desire to invent and tell a story, and to know himself. But the more I write, the more I feel the force of the other urge, which collaborates with and completes the first one: the desire to know the Other from within him. To feel what it means to be another person. To be able to touch, if only for a moment, the blaze that burns within another human being. — David Grossman

She had not yet sensed the pea beneath the pile of mattresses, the pea that belonged to the little brown-skinned girl who used to make up stories to keep her soul pinned down inside her or, at times, to let it fly - stories whose most exciting element was the word "suddenly" at the beginning of every sentence and before each description: Suddenly, suddenly, her heart would leap when she whispered to herself, suddenly. — David Grossman

She poured herself into him wordlessly. Unable to stop, she emptied her very core into him, and yelled and sobbed and laughed and promised and begged, and explained why and why not, and why they must and why they couldn't, and why there was no life without and how everything is always ripped in the same place and how she curses the moment and is resurrected over and over again endlessly. — David Grossman

Get up, go and be like him as much as one alive can be like the dead - without dying. Conceive him, yet be your death, too, almost. Like him be now, but only till the shadow of his end falls on the shadow of your being. — David Grossman

One of the greatest skills any leader can master is becoming comfortable with silence. — David Grossman

For him, the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold ... — David Grossman

The body is so beautiful, she says with newly found wonder she senses. So good and so precious. Sweet, this body of ours is sweet. It gives us so much goodness and happiness if we're only good to it, if we only listen to it, because it is so wise. It always knows what we want before we know ourselves, and it knows what's really good for us. If we only understand what it's trying to tell us, our precious body, if we only love it as it is, exactly as it is ... — David Grossman

Everything stops in her and sinks into silence. She drives slowly, foggy pictures painted in her mind. She has to open a window, but how will she withstand the rush of air? She can hardly breathe. She is frozen around a fragment embedded inside her. Only her heart is suddenly full of life, the only part of her that beats in excitement and goes out to Shaul, goes out limping, goes out hunchbacked, with Band-Aids stuck all over it, but goes out. — David Grossman

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

You go to school every morning and sit there for — David Grossman

That night, on a narrow bed in a rented room in a strange city, a dream was dreamed. — David Grossman

And suddenly I am washed over by a wave of happiness for it, for my little story, because it is a place, a home even, and I can go back to it from wherever I am — David Grossman

From the minute I saw you with the match in your hand I thought I could tell you anything on my mind.
You'd be my model, but for words. — David Grossman

And the blood pulses hard, too hard, and some sweet internal assailant comes and quickly shreds the muscles of her shoulders and neck, and soon everything will fall and dissipate, nose and ears and the three gray cells she has left, and with all her strength she tries to calm down, she must stop this, but she is unable to give up these heartbeats, the forgotten precise heartbeats which reply as an echo, and she remembers his hand upon the tablets of her heart, her hand on his chest
feel it, our prisoners are corresponding. But how? She is amazed. How did I let Shaul lead me on like this? Where have I been all evening? But she knows exactly how and where, what she was listening to and what her heart went out to. Look at you, she sighs. No, really, look at you, you and your reaching heart. — David Grossman

My destiny doomed me to be in this desert land. I will map it. — David Grossman

Want
I want
I
want, we want
to wake up,
to wake out
of it, to wake into the light, I want
to dip, to bathe my everything
in light
— David Grossman

He played the opening bars again, opening a door for her, inviting her to join. She started quietly, almost voiceless, only a thin string of sound weaving herself into his tune, as if her voice were just another string on the guitar between his fingers. She had to be careful, so no one saw the changes on her face. But she didn't want to be careful; she couldn't be careful. He played and she sang to him, and inside her more and more blocks of ice began to melt, cracking and falling into the frozen sea between them. She sang of all the things that were happening to her and him, the world that collapsed over both of them, the things that might be in store, if only they dared to believe it was possible. — David Grossman