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Book: My Name Is Asher Lev
Quotes of Book: My Name Is Asher Lev

Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
I cannot pray. I talk to God through my sculpture and painting.' 'That's also prayer.' He smiled faintly, the morning sun on his face. 'The Rebbe said precisely that. You are following the party line, Asher Lev. But we know it is not the same thing, don't we?
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
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.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
It was then that it came, though I think it had been coming for a long time and I had been choking it and hoping it would die. But it does not die. It kills you first. I knew there would be no other way to do it. No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is. Nothing is real to me except my own feelings; nothing is true except my own feelings as I see them all around me in my sculptures and paintings. I know these feelings are true, because if they were not true they would make art that is as terrible as the world.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
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?
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
Can you understand what it means for something to be incomplete?" my mother had once asked me. I understood, I understood.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
Become a great artist. That is the only way to justify what you are doing to everyone's life.'... I did not understand what he meant. I did not feel I had to justify anything... I did not want to paint in order to justify anything, I wanted to paint because I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint the same way my father wanted to travel and work for the Rebbe. My father worked for Torah. I worked for - what? How could I explain it? For beauty? No. Many of the pictures I painted were not beautiful. For what, then? For a truth I did not know how to put into words. For truth I could only bring to life by means of color and line and texture and form.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
It was a large store and i did not like to go in it because its brightness was cold, like sunlight on distant ice.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
There was an unearthly quality to the way he sang that melody that night - as if he were winging through unknown worlds in search of sources of strength beyond himself. His eyes were open, fixed, but gazing inward. There was a sweetness and sadness, a sense of pain and yearning in his voice - soft, tremulous, climbing and falling and climbing again. And when he was done there was a long silence - and in that silence I thought I heard distant cries, and I was afraid.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
I grew up encrusted with lead and spectrumed with crayons. My dearest companions were Eberhard and Crayola. Washing for meals was a cosmic enterprise.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
But I do not know how else the work can be done. To touch a person's heart, you must see a person's face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone.
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Chaim Potok _ My Name Is Asher Lev
My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning - the Rebbe.
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