Chaim Potok

“I sat near a window in our little synagogue and looked out at the large church and wondered how a statue whose face was so full of love could be worshipped by someone whose heart was so full of hate.”

“There is in my work a very strong religious foreground and background. In the later work some of that tends to diminish, but it's certainly present in the early work.”

“...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.”

“I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“My wife believes in it not one whit, but is scrupulous in its observance," said Charles Leiden, sipping from his glass. "A curious state of affairs, don't you think? We are kosher, Fermi probably attends synagogue, Albert believed in Spinoza's God and helped raise money for Israel, Teller may end up teaching in a Jewish parochial school one day, Szilard has the soul of a Jewish prophet. And we tinker with light and atomic bombs, with the energy of the universe. Do you wonder that the world doesn't know what to make of its Jews? No one is on more familiar terms with the heart of the insanity in the universe than is the Jew, and no one is more frenetic and untidy in the search for the an answer.”

“I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.”

“All of us grow up in particular realities - a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we're brought up, we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.”

“I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.”

“Something that is yours forever is never precious”

“…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And these two elements are at odds with one another because Freud is utterly adversary to almost all the ways of structuring the human experience found in Western religions. No Western religion can countenance Freud's view of man.”

“Each work seems to give me the most trouble at the time I'm working on it.”

“Yes, there is some thought about making a film of My Name Is Asher Lev.”

“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.”