Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.
Chaim PotokRead
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.
Interpretation
Our upbringing shapes our perception of reality.
This quote by Chaim Potok emphasizes the profound impact that our backgrounds have on how we interpret the world around us. It suggests that the environment we are raised in, including family and community, influences our understanding and awareness of our individual realities, either deeply or superficially depending on our level of consciousness about these influences.
In practice
During a lecture on sociology, this quote could illustrate how social structures influence individual perspectives.
Well, one hopes that if you're really related to the core of your particular culture, you have profound commitments to it, and that you are aware of how much you can strain it before you do violence to its essential nature.
… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.
A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.
A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.
He taught them that the purpose of a man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly.
I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.
I believe in nothing here, except a handful of people, a few ideas, and the fact that one cannot arrest movement.
I do not hesitate to proclaim before you and before the world that all human life-from the moment of conception and through all subsequent stages-is sacred, because human life is created in the image and likeness of God.
We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average [person] can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk." —
It seems not more reasonable to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.
Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.
A good character is the best tombstone.
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