Avital Quotes & Sayings

Among the other things I've learned as a mother, is that women continue to explain way too much. — Avital Norman Nathman

The amazing miracle of death, when one second you're walking and talking, and the next second you're an object. — Chuck Palahniuk

To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear. — Avital Ronell

It took me many years to understand that my identity is more Israeli than Jewish. — Mili Avital

In Israel, I think I have the image of an 'Ashkenazi woman' as a stereotype. Someone once told me that I look like a deodorant commercial. But my appearance is misleading; I can be emotionally aggressive, too, and in 'Law and Order,' I once played a murderer. I see no limitations. I see both my toughness and the softness. — Mili Avital

I have no sentiments for nationality or for soil. But I grew up in Israel, so those things are in my blood, and I want to be part of Israeli culture. — Mili Avital

Take my advice - it is that of your friend," he said, as he swung himself into the saddle. He gathered up the reins and struck spurs into his horse, then turned to call back to me: "Sleep upon my words, Ralph, and the next time I come I look to see a farthingale behind thee!"
"Thou art as like to see one upon me," I answered. — Mary Johnston

Exemplary friendship embraces, in a resolutely unrequited way, an unwearied capacity for loving generously without being loved back. Marking the limit of possibility - the friend need not be there - this structure recapitulates in fact the Aristotelian values according to which acts and states of loving are preferred to the condition of being-loved, which depends for its vigor on a mere potentiality. Being loved by your friend just pins you to passivity. For Aristotle, loving on the contrary, constitutes an act. To the extent that loving is moved by a kind of disclosive energy, it puts itself out there, shows up for the other, even where the other proves to be a rigorous no-show. Among other things, loving has to be declared and known, and thus involves an element of risk for the one who loves and who, abandoning any guarantee of reciprocity, braves the consequences when naming that love. — Avital Ronell

My agents do not like my choice to work only in New York and Israel - it's not a good career move. — Mili Avital

I don't think I'm gonna die tomorrow or even two weeks from now, or even ever. I just don't know - who the hell knows what's gonna happen to them? Nobody! Isn't that comforting? Nobody has a clue. I like that we don't know. And I like that it's somebody else's decision, not mine. — Elaine Stritch

Now, what if Others were encapsulated in Things, in a way that Being towards Things were not ontologically severable, in Heidegger's terms, from Being towards Others? What if the mode of Dasein of Others were to dwell in Things, and so forth? In the same light, then, what if the Thing were a Dublette of the Self, and not what is called the Other? Or more radically still, what if the Self were in some fundamental way becoming a Xerox copy, a duplicate, of the Thing in its assumed essence? — Avital Ronell

I knew I wanted to get married and have a family, but it was important that my husband be a Jew; I didn't want to have to explain what Hanukkah is. — Mili Avital

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated. — Pico Iyer

I may not be Meryl Streep, but I am not untalented. — Mili Avital

Giorgio Agamben is possibly the most delicate and probing thinker since Walter Benjamin. — Avital Ronell

Learning to speak is like learning to shoot. — Avital Ronell

I'd rather do one day on a really cool movie than six months on something crap. — Domhnall Gleeson

Stupidity exceeds and undercuts materiality, runs loose, wins a few rounds, recedes, gets carried home in a clutch of denial-and returns. Essentially linked to the inexhaustible, stupidity is also that which fatigues knowledge and wears down history. — Avital Ronell

I don't need legitimization to take part in Israeli productions; I am a good actress. To work in Israel is a financial investment for me. I do it for emotional, not artistic, reasons. — Mili Avital

Neither a pathology nor an index as such of moral default, stupidity is nonetheless linked to the most dangerous failures of human endeavor. — Avital Ronell

I loved putting on stories as plays when I was just six. I was the director, the actress and the set designer; I cast my girlfriends in parts, and I suggested to the local kindergarten teachers that we do free performances for the children. — Mili Avital

We have come a long way in terms of foreign policy. — Jean-Pierre Raffarin

The most important domestic challenge facing the U.S. at the close of the twentieth century is the re-creation of fatherhood as avital social role for men. At stake is nothing less than the success of the American experiment. For unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments
not economic growth or prison construction or welfare reform or better schools
will succeed in arresting the decline of child well-being and the spread of male violence. To tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept the inevitability of continued social recession. — David Blankenhorn