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 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.
Williamsburg was stifling, narcotized by the heat.
The sadness grew within her until she seemed to exist only as a dark nimbus of melancholy, and even Max could no longer cheer her with his talk and his
Man sees only between the blinks of his eyes. He does not know what the world is like during the blinks. He sees the world in pieces, in fragments.
Life connects us, Benjamin, not artifice.
In Culture Confrontation in Urban America, Potok uses the term Zwischenmensch to define himself and his experience of cultural conflict: Urban wanderings that result in core-culture confrontations oft...
I looked at my right hand, the hand with which I painted. There was power in that hand. Power to create and destroy. Power to bring pleasure and pain. Power to amuse and horrify. There was in that han...
I have always had this sense of books as lined up and waiting, patiently waiting, for people to find them;
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...
I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.
He became angry. It should read ‘those who fear ideas,’ not ‘those who fear God.’ There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.
God killed my little sister. That’s right, Lev. A little girl, suddenly sick and dead. Everything He touches is destroyed. Casagemas, Apollinaire, Eva, Max Jacob. How do you worship Him, Lev? He’s the...
You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy yo...
We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity...a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is no...
Truth has to be given in riddles. People can't take truth if it comes charging at them like a bull. The bull is always killed. You have to give people the truth in a riddle, hide it so they go looking...
No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that's the way the world is.
I’ve never known of a serious artist who was happy. Except maybe Rubens.
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 w...
If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble.