Quotes from Chaim Potok

He should be careful of the influence of those with whom he consorts, and he runs a great risk in becoming a member of a large society, for large bodies tend toward the leveling of individuality to a common consent, the forming and adherence to a creed.

every great artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. 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.

Isn't it better to arrest and prosecute a hundred innocent people and catch among them one spy than to let the spy go free?

God killed my little sister. That's right, Lev. A little girl, suddenly sick and dead. Everything He touches is destroyed. Casagemas, Apollinaire, Eva, Max Jacob. How do you worship Him, Lev? He's the true destroyer. Satan works out in the open, cards on the table. He gives it to you straight, no games. God plays at sweetness and goodness, and kills you. Who's worse, Satan or God? Satan at least has the decency to show us his real face. So I pay God back with my paintings.

I gambled that there was enough strength and depth in the tradition for me to be able to make it into more than Sunday-school Bible stories. I had no stomach for fundamentalism. I wanted American Judaism to become something an intelligent person would have to take seriously and be unable to laugh at and want to love.

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.

True happiness Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth and choice. —BEN JONSON

Rabbinic literature can be studied in two different ways, in two directions, one might say. It can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively - or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically. The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest it from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material.

Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.

What's next from you? Paintingwise, I mean." "I don't know. I'm between things now." "Dawn between things or dusk between things?" "I don't know that, either.

Gershon had never seen him so transformed, so possessed of open radiance, so easily moved by all around him, so hungry, so eager. The city was a woman, and he embraced it with all the tender and gentle adoration one brings to a first love.

Without the future there is no present," my father is saying. "Without the future there can be no hope for redemption, and without hope for redemption there is nothing. A man must plan for the future." Max smiles politely. That is the sort of talk, he once told me, he used to get from his own father. "They talk about redeeming the world for the future," Max said. "I have more modest goals. I wish only to redeem a canvas for today.

A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.

He's not asking me to make a choice. He's telling me to take a stand. I'm either with him or against him. All or nothing. I'm disgusted with the whole business. I don't want smicha if the price I have to pay for it is to stop thinking.

I...thought the street was crying and wondered how I could paint the street crying. I thought I had said something like that to myself before, but I could not remember when or where it might have been. The street is crying, I thought, and I'm sitting here. It's my street and I can't draw it. I want to paint it, I have to paint it while it's crying, and why am I sitting here?

When your world is destroyed and only a remnant is saved, then whatever is seen as a threat to that remnant becomes a hated enemy.

How do I convince him that the way we study Talmud is not a threat?' 'But it is a threat, Reuven. I just told you it is a threat. In the hands of those who do not love the tradition it is a dangerous weapon.' 'Everything is dangerous in the wrong hands. How do I convince him that we're not a threat?

Take care of your father, he said. There aren't many people like him around anymore.

On one of the walls of his office hung his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his law degree from the Harvard School of Law.

It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.

Had something inarticulate been handed down from generation to generation that came to life in each individual at a time most appropriate to him?

Is it better for man to live with uncertainty? Is the answer of Freud an answer? We should simply learn to accept our position as strange sick creatures? Is the answer of Nietzsche an answer? We should learn to live gladly as guests in a murderous but fascinating world that cares nothing about our presence?

You paint it," he responds. "You are a specialist in darkness." I tell him, "I didn't live through it." He says, "We all lived through it, everyone; all of humanity lived through it. Was Picasso in Guernica? Did Guido Reni see with his own eyes the slaughter of little children in Bethlehem?

Devorah tended to fill empty spaces with books: end tables, the tops of dressers, the edges of desks, on occasion even a chair. She would arrange and rearrange the books with exacting care, lining up the spines so none jutted out: sentinel rows of books.