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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.

Chaim Potok

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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
Learn
Use
Different
Something
Easier
Always
Involved
People
Learned
Learning
Alone

More quotes by Chaim Potok

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Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.
Chaim Potok
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Seeds must be sown everywhere. Only some will bear fruit. But there would not be the fruit from the few had the many not been sown
Chaim Potok
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Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.
Chaim Potok
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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
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A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.
Chaim Potok
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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
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A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.
Chaim Potok
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Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.
Chaim Potok
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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
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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
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I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.
Chaim Potok
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Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
Chaim Potok
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... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
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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
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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
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Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
Chaim Potok
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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.
Chaim Potok
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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
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… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.
Chaim Potok
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A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
Chaim Potok