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Author: Chaim Potok
Quotes of Author: Chaim Potok
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  1. 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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  2. Chaim Potok _ The Gift of Asher Lev

    May the best of the past be the worst of the future." Keep everything always off balance. No boundaries. No repetition. The opposite of what the Rebbe wants. The Rebbe seeks fixed boundaries, perfect balance, eternal repetition. Asher Lev caught between the two.
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  3. Chaim Potok _ The Gift of Asher Lev

    Without the future there is no present," my father is saying. "Without the future there can be no hope for redemption, and without hope for redemption there is nothing. A man must plan for the future." Max smiles politely. That is the sort of talk, he once told me, he used to get from his own father. "They talk about redeeming the world for the future," Max said. "I have more modest goals. I wish only to redeem a canvas for today.
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  4. Chaim Potok _ The Gift of Asher Lev

    Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it. If
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  5. Chaim Potok _ The Chosen

    I felt a sudden momentary sense of unreality, as if the play yard, with its black asphalt floor and its white base lines, were my entire world now, as if all the previous years of my life had led me somehow to this one ball game, and all the future years of my life would depend upon its outcome. I stood there for a moment, holding the glasses in my hand and feeling frightened. Then I took a deep breath, and the feeling passed. It's only a ball game, I told myself. What's a ball game?
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  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. Chaim Potok _ The Chosen

    To the rabbis who taught in the Jewish parochial schools, baseball was an evil waste of time, a spawn of the potentially assimilationist English portion of the yeshiva day. But to the students of most of the parochial schools, an inter-league baseball victory had come to take on only a shade less significance than a top grade in Talmud, for it was an unquestioned mark of one's Americanism, and to be counted a loyal American had become increasingly important to us during these last years of the war.
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  9. Chaim Potok _ The Gift of Asher Lev

    I wish that your journey will be to a light not only for yourself but for all of us. I wish that it will be a journey for the sake of heaven. I give you my blessing, Asher Lev.
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  10. Chaim Potok _ The Gift of Asher Lev

    There is never an end to our work. It is not given to us to complete it. Who completes his work? That is the way of the world, Asher. Only the Master of the Universe completed His work. And it is said that even the Master of the Universe needs humankind in order truly to complete the Creation. Without man, what is God? And without God, what is man? Everyone needs the help of someone to complete the work of Creation that is never truly completed. Everyone. An artist, a Rebbe, everyone.
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  11. 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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  12. 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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