“…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.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from Davita's Harp
“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.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from Davita's Harp
“Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of remembering.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from Davita's Harp
“Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from Davita's Harp
“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.”
― Chaim Potok, quote from Davita's Harp
Chaim Potok
Born place: in Buffalo, New York, The United States
Born date February 17, 1929
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“The elevator doors opened on the first floor and Van Holtz was waiting there with several bags of groceries in his hands.
“Oh. You,” he said. He started to walk in and, without thinking, simply reacting, Bo shoved him back out of the elevator by his head and hit the elevator button again.
“You asshole!” Bo heard as the door closed.”
― quote from Beast Behaving Badly
“So why was the goddess of Memory linked with artistic creation,you may well ask"
"Because for the Greeks creativity wasn't associated with the idea of producing something new-as it is today.The artist built upon, or reworked, the great intellectual and cultural achievements of the past.
So a great memory,you see, was considered a key part of creative activity- it gave the artist more material to draw upon, as well as a richer, more complex intellect. When James Joyce said ' I invented nothing, but I forgot nothing either," I think he was referring to exactly this sort of thing. ”
― Jeffrey Moore, quote from The Memory Artists
“Lord Salisbury’s basic educational philosophy was that higher authority could, at best, have only a marginal effect; real desire to learn had to come from within. “N. has been very hard put to it for something to do,” he wrote of a son who had been left alone with him for a few days at Hatfield. “Having tried all the weapons in the gun-cupboard in succession—some in the riding room and some, he tells me, in his own room—and having failed to blow his fingers off, he has been driven to reading Sydney Smith’s Essays and studying Hogarth’s pictures.” Lady Salisbury did not share her husband’s detached approach. “He may be able to govern the country,” she said, “but he is quite unfit to be left in charge of his children.”
― Robert K. Massie, quote from Dreadnought
“I don't know how you say good-bye to whom and what you love. I don't know a painless way to do it, don't know the words to capture a heart so full and a longing so intense.”
― Laura Wiess, quote from How It Ends
“When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.”
― Isak Dinesen, quote from Out of Africa / Shadows on the Grass
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