Best Of Chaim Potok's "My Name is Asher Lev"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Textile art above: Untitled (c.1977) by Hannelore Baron

But I will not apologize. It is absurd to apologize for a mystery.

p.3

"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."

p.192

"Asher Lev, there are two ways of painting the world. In the whole history of art, there are only these two ways. One is the way of Greece and Africa, which sees the world as a geometric design. The other is the way of Persia and India and China, which sees the world as a flower. Ingres, Cézanne, Picasso paint the world as geometry. Van Gogh, Renoir, Kadinsky, Chagall paint the world as a flower."

p.225

"An artist needs time to do nothing but sit around and think and let ideas come to him [...] Gertrude Stein said that once. She was an impossible human being. But she was wise."

p.251

"It is not in my nature to urge a person to give up his background and culture in order to become a painter. That is because it is not in my nature to be a fool. A man's painting either reflects his culture or is a comment upon it, or it is merely decoration or photography."

p.253-254

"You will have to see Florence one day, Asher Lev [...] It is a gift, that city."

I went to him the following Sunday. He looked well and was exuberant. "I am always exuberant after Italy. It is the marble."

p.275

They had lived years without me. Now they possessed a language of shared experience in which I was nonexistent. Often they would slip into the shorthand of private signs and notations that form the speech of people who have been together intimately for great lengths of time.

p.291

Traditions are born by the power of an initial thrust that hurls acts and ideas across the centuries.

p.324

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.

p.328