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My Name Is Asher Lev QUOTES

My Name Is Asher Lev QUOTES

1 " Something that is yours forever is never precious "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

2 " Did I know that the reason Hitler had been able to slaughter six million Jews without too much complaint from the world was that for two thousand years the world had been taught that Jews, not Romans, had killed that man? "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

3 " Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

4 " I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

5 " For all the pain you suffered, my mama. For all the torment of your past and future years, my mama. For all the anguish this picture of pain will cause you. For the unspeakable mystery that brings good fathers and sons into the world and lets a mother watch them tear at each other’s throats. For the Master of the Universe, whose suffering world I do not comprehend. For dreams of horror, for nights of waiting, for memories of death, for the love I have for you, for all the things I remember, and for all the things I should remember but have forgotten, for all these I created this painting—an observant Jew working on a crucifixion because there was no aesthetic mold in his own religious tradition into which he could pour a painting of ultimate anguish and torment. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

6 " ... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

7 " Art is a person's private vision expressed in aesthetic forms. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

8 " It's not a pretty world, Papa.'
'I've noticed,' my father said softly. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

9 " Millions of people can draw. Art is whether there is a scream in you wanting to get out in a special way. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

10 " It was no joy waking up after a dream about that man. He left a taste of thunder in my mouth. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

11 " How should a Jew feel? There we went through the seven gates of hell for matzos. Here I stand in matzos over my head. So how should a Jew feel? You are an angel of God, and the Rebbe, he should live and be well, the Rebbe made miracles and wonders for me. At night, I tell myself it is a dream and I am afraid to wake up. If it is a dream, better I should not wake up, better I should die in my sleep. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

12 " Every artist is a man who has freed himself from his family, his nation, his race. Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

13 " An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

14 " An artist is a person first. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

15 " > Why does everything that lives have to die?
< So life would be precious, Asher. Something that is yours forever, is never precious. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

16 " I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

17 " I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that hand the demonic and the divine at one and the same time. The demonic and the divine were two aspects of the same force. Creation was demonic and divine. Creativity was demonic and divine. I was demonic and divine. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

18 " A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

19 " But it would have made me a whore to leave it incomplete. It would have made it easier to leave future work incomplete. It would have made it more and more difficult to draw upon that additional aching surge of effort that is always the difference between integrity and deceit in a created work. I would not be the whore to my own existence. Can you understand that? I would not be the whore to my own existence. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev

20 " Oh, it makes a difference, I thought. And if it doesn't make a difference you will make it make a difference. "

― Chaim Potok , My Name Is Asher Lev