Davita's Harp - Chaim Potok Quotes

He shot my mother a look of disgust. She came to below his shoulders in height but met the look defiantly, craning her neck and staring straight at him until he turned away.

My mother explained words to me in a special way. She would give me the present meaning of the words and a brief account of its origin. If she did not know its origin, she would look it up in the dictionary in the bedroom near my father's desk.

It was important for everyone to know all the time that they weren't alone, my aunt said.

My room turned cold again. I saw my breath on my window and wrote my name with my finger, using the penmanship I was learning in school. Illana Davita Chandal. My name written clearly on a window against the cold night.

A quality of intense power seemed to radiate from his fragility, from his hooded eyes and hoarse voice, from his occasional cough. I found myself often staring at him, fascinated, unable to take my eyes from his face.

I asked my mother what the word religious meant.
She said it came from an old word that meant to bind, to tie.

There is no feeling more terrible than loneliness, no feeling worse than the sensation of being locked inside your own heart.

"I am a writer of stories," he said quietly in his raspy voice. "A writer is a strange instrument of our species, a harp of sorts, fine-tuned to the dark contradictions of life."

"Along the slope grew an unusual lilylike flower. Its outer leafy sepals were dark blue, its inner whorl of scented petals were pale blue, its stem was light purple."

And once again she turned and looked yearningly toward the cottage. She seemed to be measuring the steepness of the slope. Then the bird heard her murmur sadly, wearily, "I cannot endure the slope."

A long day in the sun on the margin of the sea.

He let me lead him into the water. He shivered with the cold and cried out as a wave broke too high against us and nearly knocked him off his feet. His face was white with fear. But I held onto him and soon the sea felt warm and we went deeper into the waves and I showed him how to ride the crests, how to anticipate the swells, how to jump as they billowed, what to do when they crash and came rushing toward us in a charging cascade of foaming water. We held hands and jumped up and down in the water, riding the waves.

"I would touch the surf. His ship was on this water and now I'm touching his ship."

He kissed me on my face and held me a long time. He was tall and strong and I loved him, my father, Michael Chandal.

"I don't like boats. Boats frighten me. People I love keep going away from me on boats."

"Forgive me. I do not like to play the game of if, Ilana. It gives me a headache, and worse, a heartache. No ifs, please."

...bits and pieces of broken dreams that kept piercing his troubled heart like shards of glass.

She stood and stepped slowly out of the boat into the water. It all seemed to take a very long time: the girl rising to her feet, the boat lurching, the astonished look on the rower's face as the girl simply walked off the boat and slid almost without a splash into the water, her dress ballooning up and covering her face, her hair billowing out behind her and then closing up like the petals of a flower as she sank.

I saw the sea move slowly back and forth upon the red earth like some breathing creature of vast and mysterious dimensions.

"O Heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty; open, we beseech Thee, our eyes to behold Thy gracious hand in all Thy works..."

There was comfort in the kneeling and a sense of my exhausted self yielding to the embrace of a presence I could not understand but felt all about me as I did the wind and the sea.

"In Him is life," she said.

We went on longer and longer rides through villages from another time, past red-sand dunes and long beaches to a coast where the sea was wild. And one afternoon we stood on a cliff near stunted, oddly shaped dead trees and watched the sea roll against a shoreline of jagged rocks, saw the wind-blown swells that were the juncture of two colliding tides crashing and boiling with a furious violence, and I was awed and a little frightened.

It was a young horse. I rode slowly with my heart thumping in my ears, feeling the horse beneath me, its rolling motions, its powerful flanks. I smelled its heat and saw the quivering motions of its muscular skin and held its mane and felt the air on my face. When the farmer helped me from the saddle I felt I had grown wings for a long moment and flown.

I remember coming upon my mother in the kitchen one night and seeing her at the table, her head in her hands. She was crying. She did not see me and I walked quietly away.

You can't forget the bad things that are done to you by telling yourself that the world isn't all bad. We really can know only the people and things that touch us. Everything else is like words in a dictionary. We can learn them but they don't live deep inside us.

Nothing I write can be as astonishing as life, which is indeed the strangest story of all.

She has had two lifetimes of sorrow already. She is the kindest and gentlest of birds, the sort whose suffering is almost never noticed. We must care for her and be gentle with her.

Like all other images burned into me over the years.

Happiness seemed to dance in her eyes like tiny specks of sunlight on the surface of a sea.

I did not turn. It was like rising and stepping slowly out of the boat into the lake. Slowly and deliberately and who cares what they think or say. I could feel them all looking at me as I opened the door and went out of the room and closed the door behind me.

I only wanted to say a few words, I said. That's all.
Say them, my love. That's what we came all this way to hear. Say them. We're listening to you.
I stood there, facing them, sunlight on my face.
I began to talk.

I wanted to say that I'm very frightened to be living in this world and I don't understand most of the things I see and hear and I don't know what will happen to me and the family I love.

She smiled. My brother and Jakob Daw didn't know it, she said softly, but they were possessed of a sacred discontent.

Be discontented with the world.

"I want to tell you a story. It's a strange story. It doesn't have an ending. But you might find it interesting anyway. It's a story about two birds and some horses on a beach far away. Are you listening, little Rachel? And it's about a door harp..."