Quote

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.

Chaim Potok

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chaim Potok
Age: 73 †
Born: 1929
Born: February 17
Died: 2002
Died: July 23
Author
Bible Translator
Novelist
Playwright
Rabbi
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
The Bronx
New York City
Herman Harold Potok
Upon
Aware
Clan
Family
Brought
Clans
Born
Grow
Depending
Reality
Particular
Realities
Home
Either
Neighborhood
Grows
Town
Small
Towns
Reading
Deeply

More quotes by Chaim Potok

Image
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.
Chaim Potok
Image
Something that is yours forever is never precious
Chaim Potok
Image
A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
Chaim Potok
Image
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!
Chaim Potok
Image
Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.
Chaim Potok
Image
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.
Chaim Potok
Image
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.
Chaim Potok
Image
I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.
Chaim Potok
Image
I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.
Chaim Potok
Image
My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years.
Chaim Potok
Image
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.
Chaim Potok
Image
It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.
Chaim Potok
Image
Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.
Chaim Potok
Image
Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.
Chaim Potok
Image
We need to listen to one another.
Chaim Potok
Image
Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
Chaim Potok
Image
... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
Image
A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.
Chaim Potok
Image
I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.
Chaim Potok
Image
Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece that way they learn to live with it.
Chaim Potok