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We need to listen to one another.
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
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More quotes by 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
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
… 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
... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
Chaim Potok
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
Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship.
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
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
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
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
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
Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
Chaim Potok
It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.
Chaim Potok
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
A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life.
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
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
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
Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul
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
