198 Quotes by Chaim Potok

Many people feel they are in possession of a great gift when they are young. But one does not always give in to a gift. One does with a life what is precious not only to one’s own self but to one’s own people.

There is an old Russian saying: When fingernails are being pulled out in Moscow, fingers are being chopped off in the provinces. That saying one can take at full value.

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.

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.

Without stories there is nothing. Stories are the world’s memory. The past is erased without stories.

I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.′ ‘That’s also prayer.’ He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. ‘The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line, Asher Lev. But we know it is not the same thing, don’t we?

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.

Another time? Why another time? Will another time make a difference, Aryeh?

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.