Chaim Potok

Novelist

1929-02-17 – 2002-07-23

Chaim Potok was an American author and rabbi known for novels about Jewish identity and tradition in modern life. His best-known works include The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev. Potok's fiction became widely read in both literary and religious communities.

Books by Chaim Potok

The Chosen
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My Name is Asher Lev
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The Promise
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Quotes by 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.
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It's not a pretty world, Papa.''I've noticed,' my father said softly.
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You can listen to silence, Reuven. 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. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it....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.
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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!
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Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.
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How can we expect to know everything about God?He looked at me, his eyes narrowing.I call that ambiguity, I said. Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same thing. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That's what I'm trying to capture in my art. That's what I mean by ambiguity.
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Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.
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I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.
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For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other's throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting— an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment.
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... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
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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.
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Two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul
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Reuven listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other.Choose a friend, I said.Yes. You know what a friend is, Reuven? A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul.I nodded.Reuven, if you can, make Danny Saunders your friend.I like him a lot, abba.No. Listen to me. I am not talking about only liking him. I am telling you to make him your friend and to let him make you his friend.
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Did I know that the reason Hitler had been able to slaughter six million Jews without too much complaint from the world was that for two thousand years the world had been taught that Jews, not Romans, had killed that man?
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...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.
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I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.—Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.
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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.
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Something that is yours forever is never precious
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I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.—Lurie, if the Torah cannot go out into your world of scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth.
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... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
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