And then I was crying too, crying with Danny, silently, for his pain and for the years of his suffering, knowing that I loved him, and not knowing whether I hated or loved the long, anguished years of...
A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you.
What is your dissertation, Ilana Davita? Babel and Camus: Twists of Fate and Faith. Babel’s The Red Cavalry and Camus’s The Stranger.
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...
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...
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...
I told her of a letter Camille Pissarro once wrote to his son about Monet’s dealers, who were insisting he exhibit only one kind of painting, the one that had become very popular with collectors. The...
An artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.
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...
What’s next from you? Paintingwise, I mean. I don’t know. I’m between things now. Dawn between things or dusk between things? I don’t know that, either.
But I do not know how else the work can be done. To touch a person’s heart, you must see a person’s face. One cannot reach a soul through a telephone.
An Austrian philosopher named Jean Améry, tortured by the Gestapo because of his activity with the Belgian resistance and then deported to Auschwitz because he was a Jew, wrote that anyone who has bee...
A man does not always remain at the same stage. He is always ascending or descending. When he reaches the top, he must concern himself with the probability that he will fall. When he reaches the botto...
A 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 meaning,...
When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of cour...
We cannot build our lives around sickness, Asher. We must have faith in the Master of the Universe.
The fact is that gossip, rumors, mythmaking, and news stories are not appropriate vehicles for the communication of nuances of truth, those subtle tonalities that are often the truly crucial elements...
I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book.
He's not asking me to make a choice. He's telling me to take a stand. I'm either with him or against him. All or nothing. I'm disgusted with the whole business. I don't want smicha if the price I have...