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cc3b220
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True happiness Consists not in the multitude of friends, But in the worth and choice. --BEN JONSON
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Chaim Potok |
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f72b0e7
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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 ..
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Chaim Potok |
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b895e28
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Reuven, I did not want my Daniel to become like my brother, may he rest in peace. Better I should have had no son at all than to have a brilliant son who had no soul. I looked at my Daniel when he was four years old, and I said to myself, How will I teach this mind what it is to have a soul? How will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person's suffering? How will I do this and not lose my so..
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Chaim Potok |
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33e37f1
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He became angry. "It should read 'those who fear ideas,' not 'those who fear God.' There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings."
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Chaim Potok |
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8c6dc42
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It's only a book. But what it means to write a book.
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Chaim Potok |
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2936998
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a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing, But the man who lves that span, he is something... A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning.
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Chaim Potok |
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5a8fc85
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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.
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Chaim Potok |
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Take care of your father," he said. "There aren't many people like him around anymore."
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Chaim Potok |
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If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble.
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Chaim Potok |
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My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning - the Rebbe.
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Chaim Potok |
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98e95e8
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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.
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Chaim Potok |
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377e657
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Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed, Lev. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking for it and find it piece by piece; that way they learn to live with it.
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Chaim Potok |
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32c07f4
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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 ..
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Chaim Potok |
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cb755d3
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The sadness grew within her until she seemed to exist only as a dark nimbus of melancholy, and even Max could no longer cheer her with his talk and his
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Chaim Potok |
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We have hurt you, yet you love us. We have exiled you, yet you are tied to us. "Though He slay me, yet will I have faith in Him."
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Chaim Potok |
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e2c380f
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As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them--'ordinary things' is a better expression. That is the way the world is.
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Chaim Potok |
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a662542
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I like his optimism,' I said. 'I like the way when he and some other rabbis saw a jackal in the ruins of Jerusalem, and the others began to cry, he laughed and said that just as the prophecy of the destruction of the temple was fulfilled, so the prophecy of the rebuilding would also be fulfilled. I like that.
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optimism
temple
prophecy
jewish
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Chaim Potok |
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54495c0
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How can we expect to know everything about God?" He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. "I call that ambiguity," I said. "Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same thing. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That's what I'm trying to capture in my art. That's what I mean by ambiguity."
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Chaim Potok |
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d88ba41
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Verbal fraud is worse than monetary fraud.
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Chaim Potok |
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e8c6a6b
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Excuse me, you taught trope in Theresienstadt?
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Chaim Potok |
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40bfd2e
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Asher, an animal cannot help what he does. A human being is able to control himself if he wills it.
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Chaim Potok |
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Life connects us, Benjamin, not artifice.
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Chaim Potok |
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The customs people were angered by my drawings. I told them I didn't make the drawings to cause trouble; I was an artist, and an artist draws what he sees and feels and thinks. But they tried to confiscate the drawings anyway and
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Chaim Potok |
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875eb21
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A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the top, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the bottom, he must strive once again to climb to the top. That is the nature of man. When the soul of a man is in its darkest night, he must strive constantly for new light. When one thinks there is only an end, that is when one must struggle for the n..
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Chaim Potok |
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a4063c3
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But I do not know how else the work can be done. To touch a person's heart, you must see a person's face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone.
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Chaim Potok |
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And now you'll be able to sail right through to the end." "I've already written the end. It was the beginning I couldn't write." "The story you just told me is part of your beginning?" "It is the myself that predates what I am now."
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Chaim Potok |
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A ram comes always as an astonishment. Do you know what a ram is, Benjamin? R-A-M. A random act of menschlichkeit.
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Chaim Potok |
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Obstacles are given us in order to make our desire even stronger. The more a thing is hidden from man, the more he desires it, and the greater the chance he will one day discover it.
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Chaim Potok |
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5802d80
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DW: Some critics have written that they don't admire your so-called simple style. You have contended that your writing is a result of much rewriting and much revision and is deliberate. CP: The style is simplicity for the sake of complexity. Whoever feels that it is a "simple style" has to look into it and find the right way. Of course the style has become over the years much more complex and much more simple. Two fundamental things about t..
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Chaim Potok |
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9c1c4f7
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It's my world, best friend. And I haven't seen anything outside that's better.
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Chaim Potok |
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c310643
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There's a rabbi in the Talmud who even says there's no atonement for lashon hara.
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Chaim Potok |
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The tiny color planes in the Cezanne, like the pieces of a riddle, exquisitely explored, investigated, probed, resolved, each daub of color another piece of his answer to the greatest riddle of all: how we see and think the world.
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Chaim Potok |
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7205ff1
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What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita?" "Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel's The Red Cavalry and Camus's The Stranger."
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Chaim Potok |
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4803aa0
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Gossip, gossip, gossip. Rumors. Tongues. 'Life and death are in the power of the tongue,' " he quoted in Hebrew."
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Chaim Potok |
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An Austrian philosopher named Jean Amery, tortured by the Gestapo because of his activity with the Belgian resistance and then deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew, wrote that anyone who has been tortured remains forever tortured and can never again be at ease in the world. One's faith in humanity is broken and can never be acquired again.
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Chaim Potok |
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fd79850
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Devorah told me, "Our daughter is grown," and there were tears in her eyes."
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Chaim Potok |
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cb048e8
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I've never known of a serious artist who was happy. Except maybe Rubens.
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Chaim Potok |
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63e88a1
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Some troubles do not go away as we grow older. They grow older with us.
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Chaim Potok |
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6f0028c
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A person has to have a reason for living, and the best reason is another person. Together they can make a plan for their lives.
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Chaim Potok |
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3ac40d5
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It hurts a father to see a son this way. It makes no difference what age the son is; it hurts.
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Chaim Potok |
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07bdd6c
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I call that ambiguity," I said. "Riddles, puzzles, double meanings, lost possibilities, the dark side to the light, the light side to the darkness, different perspectives on the same things. Nothing in this whole world has only one side to it. Everything is like a kaleidoscope. That's what I'm trying to capture in my art. That's what I mean by ambiguity."
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Chaim Potok |
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c492cba
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On one of the walls of his office hung his undergraduate degree from Columbia and his law degree from the Harvard School of Law.
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Chaim Potok |
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7546698
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Like the French frontier police who thought that some of Picasso's Cubist drawings were plans of the country's defenses.
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Chaim Potok |
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a28787f
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Is he aware of both--and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret motives?
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Chaim Potok |