The Chosen [Play] Quotes

“To the rabbis who taught in the Jewish parochial schools, baseball was an evil waste of time, a spawn of the potentially assimilationist English portion of the yeshiva day. But to the students of most of the parochial schools, an inter-league baseball victory had come to take on only a shade less significance than a top grade in Talmud, for it was an unquestioned mark of one's Americanism, and to be counted a loyal American had become increasingly important to us during these last years of the war.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen [Play]

“He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. When his people would ask him why he was so silent with his son, we would say to them that he did not like to talk, words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence. One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one's own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen [Play]

“And in that silence he began to hear the world crying.' - Chaim Potok, The Chosen”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen [Play]

“As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them—'ordinary things' is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”
― Chaim Potok, The Chosen [Play]