Chaim Potok Quotes

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

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

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.

Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way!Thou art the Potter and I am the clay.

An artist is a person first.

Every 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.

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.

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