Chaim Potok

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.

— Chaim Potok

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. 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.

— Chaim Potok

I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, "What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!"

— Chaim Potok

Reuven, 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.

— Chaim Potok

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 dimension all its own.

— Chaim Potok

I don't understand why I wanted to kill you.

— Chaim Potok

It is never pleasant to be a buffer, Reuven.

— Chaim Potok

It was senseless, as— I held my breath, feeling myself shiver with fear— as Billy's blindness was senseless.

— Chaim Potok

[Danny] laughed once and said, 'That man is such an ignoramus, Father.' I was angry. 'Look into his soul,' I said. 'Stand inside his soul and see the world through his eyes. You will know the pain he feels because of his ignorance, and you will not laugh.' He was bewildered and hurt. The nightmares he began to have. . . . But he learned to find answers for himself. He suffered and learned to listen to the suffering of others. In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying."

— Chaim Potok

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

— Chaim Potok

> Why does everything that lives have to die?

— Chaim Potok

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

— Chaim Potok

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.

— Chaim Potok