Did he really believe God wrote stories that were open to one explanation only? A story that knew but one explanation could hardly be interesting and was certainly not worth the trouble of...

In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more...

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

It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon...

My name is Asher Lev... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous...

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

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship, he told me. Haven't you learned that yet, Reuven?

… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.

The 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...

A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is.

Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important thing that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them- "ordinary things" is a better...

I cannot have gone through what I went through and have lost what I lost if it's all meaningless.

It's always easier to learn something than to use what you've learned. . . . You're alone when you're learning. But you always use it on other people. It's different when there are other people...

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 is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it...

I will go wherever the truth leads me. It is secular scholarship, Rebbe; it is not the scholarship of tradition. In secular scholarship there are no boundaries and no permanently fixed views.Lurie, if...

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

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

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...