A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.
("The Chosen")
More Quotes from Chaim Potok:
As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.Chaim Potok
It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.
Chaim Potok
There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.
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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.
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To the extent that I come from a deeply religious tradition and have been contending with those beginnings all of my life - that constitutes the subject of much of my early fiction.
Chaim Potok
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Based on Topics: Genius Quotes, God Quotes, Good & Evil Quotes, Laziness Quotes, Man Quotes, Mind Quotes, Soul QuotesBased on Keywords: fanned, reuven
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