Quotes from Chaim Potok

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.

In other words, Judaism is not Calvinism.

Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms.

We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? . . .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.

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.

A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship, he told me. Haven't you learned that yet, Reuven?

Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way.

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.

Why does everything that lives have to die? < So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious.

I cannot have gone through what I went through and have lost what I lost if it's all meaningless.

Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important thing that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them- ordinary things is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

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.

It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon...

the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

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.

In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.

We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity...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...A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life.

I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.

The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.

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.

A person must know who he is. A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them. It is hard for a person to understand his own weaknesses.

Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.