Ayelet Gundar-Goshen > Quotes

“People often prefer to deny what is right before their eyes, especially if they can continue to hold on to what is in their hearts.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“And like you always say, the fact that someone is born a human being doesn’t mean he’ll act like one.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“emigrate is to leave one place for another, with the place you’ve left tied to your ankle with steel chains. If it’s difficult for a person to emigrate, it’s only because it’s difficult to walk in the world when an entire country is shackled to your ankle, dragging behind you wherever you go.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“Ξέρεις όμως, Ρίβκα,

τα παιδιά ξέρουν πως η παιδική ηλικία είναι αιώνια, κι εμείς ξέρουμε πως η παιδική ηλικία είναι στιγμιαία, κι αυτά και εμείς έχουμε απόλυτο δίκιο,

γιατί ο χρόνος λέει ψέματα σε όλους.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“The distance between a hungry person and a sated one is greater than the distance between here and the moon.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“Why couldn’t there be two suns in the sky? Why did the rise of one large orb of light necessitate the setting of another?”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“You think this country returns our love? Nonsense! She vomits us up time and time again, sends us to hell, beats us down without mercy. With the Romans and the Greeks and the Arabs and the mosquitoes. So you think that someone here says, 'If she doesn't want me, I should go?' Someone here says 'There's no point in holding a country by force if she's been trying to get rid of you from the minute you came to her?' No. You hold on to her as hard as you can and you hope. You hope that maybe she'll finally look around and see you and say - that one. That's the one I want.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch

“Workplaces like to celebrate holidays. Not only hospitals. Law firms, city government offices, banks. The opportunity to see your boss sing, to eat something, to pretend we’re all one big family. And if not, then at least friends. Acquaintances. It can’t be that we’re just a group of people closed up together between cement walls, under artificial lighting, from morning until night.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“closed them and curled into his arms. His large hands wrapped around her as he slept, no questions, no doubts.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“Remember how you used to daydream that your doctoral adviser would die in an accident?”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“Zeev Feinberg parted from his own obligation and left Yaffa on the sofa, blushing about something he had just wispered to her. Now Zeev wanted to see what the goddess of luck had given his friend, and once again noted that the bitch invariably gives nuts to people who have no teeth.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch

“На работу – в 8:25 – следователь Дорит являлась, успев провести два часа в обществе своих детей. Каждый день она будила их в 6:00, развозила по трем разным школам и снабжала наставлениями. Младшего сына, ученика начальной школы, призывала остерегаться кибербуллинга в интернете; старшему сыну, заканчивавшему школу второй ступени, рассказывала о непоправимом вреде, причиняемом всеми видами наркотиков; а учившейся в школе третьей ступени дочери расписывала в красках ужасы родильного отделения. Дети вылезали из машины напуганными до самой глубины своих юных ранимых душ, и неудивительно, что им хотелось успокоиться. И они успокаивались – кто как мог. Первый третировал мальчишек на школьном дворе, второй – курил душистые вещества у школьного забора, а третья – наскоро перепихивалась с мальчиком, жившим напротив школы.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“Because you must have one place that is free of questions and doubts. Otherwise it is really sad.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“But he was always like that, reporting the facts with a slight deviation that would suit his needs.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“My wife always said that being a mother or a father means always being anxious. You know, I once thought that the greatest mystery in our lives was our parents. Today, I think that maybe the greatest mystery in people's lives is their children.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“It's amazing how two people can meet without really seeing each other at all, and if geometry does not recognize that two parallel lines can intersect, it's only because mathematicians do not visit enough alleys.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“I took my Ralph Lauren dress out of the closet. I’d bought it after I saw Jane wearing a similar one at a company party, but Jane was twenty-nine and I was forty-four, and the dress knew it.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“After what happened in the synagogue, we can’t allow ourselves to be complacent.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“Because so it is, sitting alone in the seam between day and night: dreams are still stronger than regrets, yearning overcomes inhibition, until the sun rises to shame us and drive our desires back to their burrows.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“like all fathers, he harbored a secret hope that perhaps not.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“Por isso falava silenciosamente com o sol, na língua das estrelas, dizendo-lhe que viesse mais devagar, por favor, mais devagar. E, naquele mesmo momento, Iaakov Markovitch, deitado em sua cama, que pela primeira vez era também a cama de Bela Markovitch, implorava: mais devagar, por favor, mais devagar. E o sol, apesar de cientistas que insistiam que não era mais que fusão de hidrogênio e hélio, não podia negar as súplicas. Pois o sol – independentemente do que dissessem os cientistas – amava as pessoas em sua totalidade, na medida em que a distância permitia. Não fosse assim não circularia em torno delas dia e noite com preocupação, com dedicação maternal. E mesmo se cientistas dissessem que não era o sol que girava em torno das pessoas, e sim as pessoas em torno dele, e, mais grave ainda, que o giro nada tinha a ver com amor ou preocupação, e fosse motivado apenas por leis físicas, não haveria como contestar nem por um segundo aquilo que o olho enxergava e o coração sabia.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch

“After all, more lies remain undiscovered than are revealed, harmless little lies absorbed into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from the truth.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Liar

“That’s how it was—hip-hop on the way to school, Beatles on the way back, and in between, silence. He was in school, I was at home, Mikhael was at work. Three rivers that did not touch until the evening, when we joined into a single sea for a dinner that was sometimes noisy and sometimes quiet but always, always took place in total oblivion.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“I didn’t like Mikhael’s way of engineering people’s behavior. His system of incentives seemed like something you’d do with sea lions, not people. But Mikhael insisted, saying that the entire American economy worked that way so there was no reason it wouldn’t work with our reclusive son.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“Dlho potom, čo odišiel z autodielne, ešte cítila na sebe jeho pohľad. Chlapi sú schopní robiť s vami očami niečo podobné, ako sa robí s vôdzkou na psom krku. Netreba ťahať, stačí, že pes vie, že tam vôdzka je, a už sa správa slušne. Chlapi sú schopní aj vôbec sa na vás nepozerať. Tak ako je to s chrobáčikom v kúte izby, hoci si ho všimnete, niet prečo o ňom hovoriť. Nanajvýš ho môžete obrátiť na chrbát a prizerať sa ako sa pokúša obrátiť späť na nohy.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“Her feet dug into the sand, and the sand was warm and smooth. The wind brought it here, and the wind would take it away from here, and that was fine because the sand did not remember. The sand didn't know where it had been yesterday and didn't know where it would be tomorrow. If that weren't so, if the sand remembered all the places it had been, it would become so heavy that no wind would be able to carry it off to anywhere.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“To emigrate is to leave one place for another, with the place you’ve left tied to your ankle with steel chains. If it’s difficult for a person to emigrate, it’s only because it’s difficult to walk in the world when an entire country is shackled to your ankle, dragging behind you wherever you go.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“Lions roared inside him all night.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Waking Lions

“You know," I said and looked into Uri's eyes for the first time since I'd begun to speak, "after we moved to America, I sometimes dreamed that we still lived in our old apartment in Tel Aviv. I loved Israel, I loved it the way a woman loves her abusive husband but understands that she has to get away from him in order to save her children”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt

“after we moved to America, I sometimes dreamed that we still lived in our old apartment in Tel Aviv. I loved Israel, I loved it the way a woman loves her abusive husband but understands that she has to get away from him in order to save her children.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, The Wolf Hunt