Chaim Potok Quotes

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

An artist is a person first.

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I n...

I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a st...

All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. De...

But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the medi...

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal...

Something that is yours forever is never precious

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happ...

How can we expect to know everything about God?"He looked at me, his eyes narrowing."I call that amb...

Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. ...

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you'r...

It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be...

Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.

How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in mat...

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special...

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it i...

Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we...

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has...

The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too lon...

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

It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. ...

My wife believes in it not one whit, but is scrupulous in its observance," said Charles Leiden, sipp...

Reuven listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acqui...

A word is worth one coin, silence is worth two

> Why does everything that lives have to die?< So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is y...

I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimen...

You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn fr...

Did I know that the reason Hitler had been able to slaughter six million Jews without too much compl...

He looked down at the books. There was a long silence. Then he raised his eyes and directed his gaze...

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship o...

I like his optimism,' I said. 'I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruin...

In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent ...

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the ...

...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.

In Russia I went to a great yeshiva, and in America I work in a carnival.

I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.