Chaim Potok Quotes

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

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

About Author

Chaim Potok (February 17, 1929 – July 23, 2002) was an American author, novelist, playwright, editor and rabbi. Of the more than a dozen novels he authored, his first book The Chosen (1967) was listed on The New York Times Best Seller list for 39 weeks and sold more than 3.4 million copies, and was adapted into a well-received 1981 feature film by the same title.
Potok was a member of the executive committee of the Writers and Artists for Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Israel group.

It was a large store and i did not like to go in it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice.

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 i...

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

…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.

Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering...

For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings goo...

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, righ...

Become a great artist. That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone's life.'... I did not understand what he meant. I did not feel I had to justify anything... I did not want to pain...

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

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.Lurie, if...

> Why does everything that lives have to die?< So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious.

Something that is yours forever is never precious

I like his optimism,' I said. 'I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruins of Jerusalem, and the others began to cry, he laughed and said that just as the prophecy of the de...

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

Some troubles do not go away as we grow older. They grow older with us.

A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.

Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriot...

How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of God, and the Rebbe, he should live a...