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...
The two extremes of secular life. Stoic acceptance and gay defiance in the face of—nothing; in the face of indifference, boiling violence, inexorable chaos; in the face of—the Other Side. Two hundred...
Is he aware of both—and unaware? Can the mind ride two such separate tracks simultaneously? Concealed ambivalence. Hidden ambiguity. Are we so flawed that we can never truly know our own most secret m...
I won't talk to you about my family and you won't talk to me about yours. Family talk is either boring or self-pitying. Or it's Gothic, like a Faulkner novel. Who needs to talk about it? It's enough t...
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...
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,...
Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.
The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too long silence.
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.
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.
I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.
Gossip, gossip, gossip. Rumors. Tongues. ‘Life and death are in the power of the tongue,’ he quoted in Hebrew.
Disorder and frequent sorrow the mulch for creativity.
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 i...
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. M...
White is fearful to gaze upon for too long: it is the color of shrouds; it is all-color, the prism fused, undifferentiated, linked wave to wave and particle to particle.
The tiny color planes in the Cézanne, like the pieces of a riddle, exquisitely explored, investigated, probed, resolved, each daub of color another piece of his answer to the greatest riddle of all: h...
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 meani...
On the fifteenth of August, Tisha B’av, there had been Arab disturbances in Jerusalem. The British said these had been in reaction to the demonstration staged by the followers of Jabotinsky at the Wes...
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 su...