Davita's Harp Quotes

“…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, 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, 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, Davita's Harp

“Good-bye, Davita. Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

“Why has God not made man just as He wanted him to be?” he answered, “For the very reason that the duty of man is to perfect himself.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

“Be discontented with the world. But be respectful at the same time.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

“Law that is used to victimize the stranger, the one who is helpless—that is the law of Sedom and Amorrah.”
― Chaim Potok, 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, Davita's Harp

“Akiba was an ignorant shepherd, it said, and began to study when he was forty years old.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

“I had learned a strange lesson: walls are laws to some people, and laws are walls to others.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

“I told myself that each dawn was dimmed by what the sun had witnessed on its journey across bleeding Europe.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp