Quotes from Davita's Harp

Chaim Potok ·  371 pages

Rating: (5K votes)


“…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



About the author

Chaim Potok
Born place: in Buffalo, New York, The United States
Born date February 17, 1929
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Just as sometimes I wondered if Grandpa had ever existed, sometimes I wondered if I truly existed myself. As I was running, I could see myself from outside myself: a skinny girl with the flapping shorts and too- big a T-shirt, always watching the other girls at school, a girl in a pink bedroom sitting with a book propped on her knees, the words she was reading entering her mind, some sticking like gluey never to be forgotten, others disappearing instantly, I could remember everything and remember nothing. I would watch a movie and recall every scene as if I had written the script, then watch another movie another day and be unable to recall it at all.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind


“The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself worthy of being loved.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin


“If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz


“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)


“The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories


Interesting books

Crimson Bound
(15.7K)
Crimson Bound
by Rosamund Hodge
Gangsta Granny
(8.3K)
Gangsta Granny
by David Walliams
The Rebel Angels
(4.4K)
The Rebel Angels
by Robertson Davies
Everything We Keep
(81.9K)
Everything We Keep
by Kerry Lonsdale
The Land of Laughs
(4.8K)
The Land of Laughs
by Jonathan Carroll
The Uplift War
(21.8K)
The Uplift War
by David Brin

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.