If we don't stop somewhere, if we don't accept an unhappy compromise, unhappy for both sides, if we don't learn how to unhappily coexist and contain our burned sense of injustice - if we don't learn how to do that, we end up in a doomed state.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the importance of accepting compromises to avoid a detrimental state of conflict.
Amos Oz emphasizes the necessity of navigating conflicts through acceptance and compromise. He suggests that failing to find a way to coexist amid disagreements leads to a deteriorating situation for all parties involved. By learning to accept and manage our sense of injustice, we can avoid the doom that comes from unresolved tensions.
In practice
During a team meeting to resolve issues, I quoted Amos Oz to emphasize the need for compromise.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims.
Fundamentalist s live life with an exclamation point. I prefer to live my life with a question mark.
Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.
I have seen for the first time in 100 years of conflict, the two peoples - the Israeli people and the Palestinian people - are ahead of their leaderships.
She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.
By virtue of the way it has organized its technological base, contemporary industrial society tends to be totalitarian. For "totalitarian" is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic-technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests.
Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it.
Violence is a symptom of impotence.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.
Most simply, 'present shock' is the human response to living in a world that's always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it's the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it's just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally arrive there.
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