The Book of Lights Quotes

“I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough to live it.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“My wife believes in it not one whit, but is scrupulous in its observance," said Charles Leiden, sipping from his glass. "A curious state of affairs, don't you think? We are kosher, Fermi probably attends synagogue, Albert believed in Spinoza's God and helped raise money for Israel, Teller may end up teaching in a Jewish parochial school one day, Szilard has the soul of a Jewish prophet. And we tinker with light and atomic bombs, with the energy of the universe. Do you wonder that the world doesn't know what to make of its Jews? No one is on more familiar terms with the heart of the insanity in the universe than is the Jew, and no one is more frenetic and untidy in the search for the an answer.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Gershon had never seen him so transformed, so possessed of open radiance, so easily moved by all around him, so hungry, so eager. The city was a woman, and he embraced it with all the tender and gentle adoration one brings to a first love.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Confronted by a certainty and an uncertainty, you decide for the certainty,”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“What good is physics in the hands of a species that is still partly reptilian? We’ll kill ourselves with all that physics.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“She had short dark hair and dark eyes and brown skin and was possessed of the charm and vivacity often taken on as compensatory characteristics by the ungifted and the plain.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“All my life I have hated war. It is the greatest curse of man’s history. War. It comes from absolute ignorance, absolute greed, absolute cruelty.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“He thought he could sense himself slipping through their eyes into the landscape of their pain.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“The irrational completes us.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“He preferred the window to the blackboard.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“It is all a whimsical game, a nothing, really. And yet somehow I seem unable to reconcile myself to that.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“when a man’s time comes to leave this world, his shadow deserts him.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Without a listener’s response the Kaddish was meaningless; the response was the soul of the Kaddish, its living center.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Every other day I disintegrate into a quivering bundle of cloacal needs.” “Try kimchi with the coffee. Your needs will become continuous.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Perhaps you should try to make visible the sounds he hears.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“One tended to garrulity when one’s stock of years and memories attained to a certain level.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Time-honored custom. Law of nature. Price of moral success is blood.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Do not regard the vessel but what is in it.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights

“Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it’s Gothic, like a Faulkner novel.”
― Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights