Chaim Potok Quotes (48 Quotes)


    I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. 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. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

    If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.

    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.

    No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.



    The blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. 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.


    But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence.

    How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of God, and the Rebbe, he should live and be well, the Rebbe made miracles and wonders for me. At night, I tell myself it is a dream and I am afraid to wake up. If it is a dream, better I should not wake up, better I should die in my sleep.


    I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine.

    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.


    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


    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.

    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.

    Well, in The Chosen, Danny Saunders, from the heart of his religious reading of the world, encounters an element in the very heart of the secular readings of the world - Freudian psychoanalytic theory.

    In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

    What I have in advance are people I want to write about and a problem or problems that I see those people encountering and that I want to explore - it all proceeds sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and scene by scene.

    Apocalyptic versions are fall-back systems when the normal systems cease to offer effective answers to the dilemmas of existence.

    A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end.

    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.

    I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

    I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.

    Come, let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.

    A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning.

    Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.

    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.

    Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.

    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.

    It is inconceivable to me that a million or three million or half a million human beings will think and feel precisely the same way on any single subject.

    Two hundred or more years ago most people on the planet were never aware of any reality other than the one into which they were brought up.

    I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

    I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

    And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.

    Life is like the blink of an eye. What is that worth Nothing. But the eye that blinks - that is something. I guess I blinked, on accident. Sometimes, though, I have found accidents to be the most fortuitous events in my life. You meet the one person who reminds you what you are, what you do, how to be happy.

    It is impossible to fuse totally with a culture for which you feel a measure of antagonism.

    And yet there are some magnificent things from Freud, profound insights into the nature of man.

    But today we become aware of other readings of the human experience very quickly because of the media and the speed with which people travel the planet.

    As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

    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.

    Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.

    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.

    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.

    Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a 'universal' without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.

    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.

    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.


    More Chaim Potok Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Life - Man - Work & Career - World - Mind - Custom & Convention - God - Quantity - Thought & Thinking - Astronomy & Cosmology - Reality - Time - People - Creativity & Innovation - Name - Family - Writing - Quality - Home - View All Chaim Potok Quotations

    More Chaim Potok Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - My Name Is Asher Lev
    - The Chosen

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