"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 not 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."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 326)

"I hoped that the Ribbono Shel Olom would listen more seriously to my prayers for my parents and Jacob Kahn than he had to my father's prayers for me."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 268)

"An artist who deceives himself is a fraud and a whore. You [cut off your payos] because you were ashamed. You did that because wearing payos did not fit your idea as an artist. Asher Lev, an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist. It is of no importance to me whether you wear your payos behind your ears or whether you cut off your hair entirely and go around bald...Great artists will not give a damn about your payos; they will only give a damn about your art...You want to cutt off your payos, go ahead. But do not do it because you think it will make you more acceptable as an artist."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 257)

"I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible this 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...One day you will understand about the truth of feelings."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 226)

"As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it...An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 218)

"You draw with too much love. No man can love as much as you and survive as an artist. You will become sentimental. And sentimentalism is death to art."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 215)

"No one will listen to what you have to say unless they are convinced you have mastered it. Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right no attempt to add to it or to rebel against it."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 213)

"Millions of people can draw. 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 (pg. 212)

"A life should be lived for the sake of heaven. One man is not better than another because he is a doctor while the other is a shoemaker. One man is not better than another because he is a lawyer while the other is a painter. A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven."

-Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev (pg. 192)

"All the Jewish people are one body and one soul...If one part of the body hurts, the entire body hurts--and the entire body must come to the help of the part that hurts."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 132)

"To touch a person's heart, you must see a person's face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 117)

"Someone once asked how it is possible to establish a connection between man and the Master of the Universe. The answer was that man must take the first step. In order for there to be a connection between man and the Master of the Universe, there must first be an opening, a passageway, even a passageway as small as the eye of a needle. but man must make the opening by himself; man must take the beginning step. Then the Master of the Universe will move in, as it were, and widen the passageway."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 110)

"A Jew should not only talk, he should also do."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 81)

"To kill a human being is to kill also the children and children's children that might have come from him down through all the generations."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 58)

"It is absurd to apologize for a mystery."

-Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (pg. 3)

"A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 276)

"You can listen to silence, Reuven. I've begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it...You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn't always talk. Sometimes--sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 262)

"A teacher can also sometimes not know."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 249)

"'Reuven, do you know what the rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die?'
I stared at him. 'No,' I heard myself say.
'He said to Moses, "You have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest."'"

---

Human beings do not live forever Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value there is to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. 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. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so it's quality is immeasureable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one's life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 216-217)

"When I was ten or eleven years old, I complained to [my father] about something, and he told me to close my mouth and look into my soul. He told me to stop running to him every time I had a problem. I should look into my own soul for the answer."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 170)