The Chosen

Chaim Potok

Get this SparkNote to go!

Important Quotations Explained

1. I stood in that room for a long time, watching the sunlight and listening to the sounds on the street outside. I stood there, tasting the room and the sunlight and the sounds, and thinking of the long hospital ward. . . . I wondered if little Mickey had ever seen sunlight come though the windows of a front room apartment. . . . Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life.


2. “We are commanded to study His Torah! We are commanded to sit in the light of the Presence! It is for this that we were created! . . . Not the world, but the people of Israel!”


3. “What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? … I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. . . .”


4. “[My father] taught me with silence. . .to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. . . . One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain … by turning inside oneself. . . . It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.”


5. “We shook hands and I watched him walk quickly away, tall, lean, bent forward with eagerness and hungry for the future, his metal capped shoes tapping against the sidewalk. Then he turned into Lee Avenue and was gone.”


Readers' Notes allow users to add their own analysis and insights to our SparkNotes—and to discuss those ideas with one another. Have a novel take or think we left something out? Add a Readers' Note!

More Help

Buy the print The Chosen SparkNote on BN.com

The SparkNote you can hold in your hand.

Buy the ebook of this SparkNote on BN.com

Easy to view on your iPod, phone, or ereader.

EVEN MORE HELP! ↓

Take a Study Break

SparkLife

Star Trek gets SEXY

Chris Pine and Zoe Saldana heat up the red carpet!

SparkLife

Are you afraid of relationships?

Auntie SparkNotes can help!

SparkLife

Wanna get JLaw's gorgeous glow?

Click here for simple, sexy makeup tricks!

SparkLife

Sexy starlet style

See every single look from the Met Gala!

SparkLife

Who'd be on your zombie-apocalypse crew?

We already dib'sed Genghis Khan.

Geek out!

The MindHut

Geeky Actors: Then and Now

Travel back in time!

The MindHut

10 Movies Better Than Their Books

What do you think?

The MindHut

How To Look Like J-Law...

When you don't look like J-Law.

The MindHut

12 Scientific Inaccuracies in Into Darkness

What did Star Trek get wrong?

The MindHut

Villains We Want These Actresses to Play

From super cute to super bad!

The Book

Cover image

Order The Chosen at BN.com

All the words, printed on paper. Classic!

Cover image

Read What You Love, Anywhere You Like

Get Our FREE NOOK Reading Apps