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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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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
Chosen
Meaning
Given
Must
Men
Life
Automatically
Fill
More quotes by Chaim Potok
Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
Chaim Potok
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
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
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
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
We need to listen to one another.
Chaim Potok
Something that is yours forever is never precious
Chaim Potok
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
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
... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
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
Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul
Chaim Potok
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
…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.
Chaim Potok
Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.
Chaim Potok
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
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.
Chaim Potok
Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.
Chaim Potok
A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.
Chaim Potok
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
Chaim Potok
