Quotes from Chaim Potok

God is merciful in what He sometimes lets us forget.

It's only a book. But what it means to write a book.

It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth.

I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city.

We become like dead branches and last year's leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto.

If there were not anxiety behind those apples, Cézanne would not interest me any more than Bouguereau.

Jestliže se chceÅ¡ dotknout srdce nÄ›jakého ?lovÄ›ka, musíÅ¡ vidÄ›t jeho tváÃ…â"¢. Do duÅ¡e se nedostaneÅ¡ telefonem.

Those mornings, the beach was my synagogue and the waves and gulls were audience to my prayers. I stood on the beach and felt wind-blown sprays of ocean on my face, and I prayed. And sometimes the words seemed more appropriate to this beach than to the synagogue on my street.

I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world.

There is never an end to our work. It is not given to us to complete it. Who completes his work? That is the way of the world, Asher. Only the Master of the Universe completed His work. And it is said that even the Master of the Universe needs humankind in order truly to complete the Creation. Without man, what is God? And without God, what is man? Everyone needs the help of someone to complete the work of Creation that is never truly completed. Everyone. An artist, a Rebbe, everyone.

I felt a sudden momentary sense of unreality, as if the play yard, with its black asphalt floor and its white base lines, were my entire world now, as if all the previous years of my life had led me somehow to this one ball game, and all the future years of my life would depend upon its outcome. I stood there for a moment, holding the glasses in my hand and feeling frightened. Then I took a deep breath, and the feeling passed. It's only a ball game, I told myself. What's a ball game?

Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

A man must sometimes be forced to make choices, for it is only by his choices that we know what a man truly is.

Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.

A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you.

An artist is a person first.

If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble.

We will have many fights. But they will be for the sake of Torah.

The everyday was king. And the courtiers were popularization, superficiality, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.

They become angry and ugly and they fight anything that's a threat to them. We have to learn how to fight back without hurting them too much.

Every day learns from the one that went before, but no day teaches the one that follows. Well

Great artists make the entire world their home.

Weeks of longing and solitude: twin muses of creation.

Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments.