Chaim Potok Quotes - Page 2

Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.

It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.

It's not a pretty world, Papa.' 'I've noticed,' my father said softly.

A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.

We need to listen to one another.

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.

You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes-sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

I get up around 6:30. I work from about 8:00 to 1:00, take a break for lunch, work again until about 5:00, and then go for a long walk and have dinner. Then, if my wife and I have no previous plans, we decide what to do for the evening.

I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people involved.

In our time ... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"

It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.