How we cite our quotes: (Page.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I looked at my hand. I saw the old Waterman fountain pen my father had once given me. On the way out of my room earlier that morning, I had put the pen into one of pockets. Now I held it in my hand. I had drawn a face with it across an entire printed page of my Chumash. I had drawn the face in thick black ink. It was a bearded face, dark-eyed, dark-haired, vaguely menacing. On top of the face, I had drawn a head of dark hair covered by an ordinary hat. (123.3)
When Asher draws a gruesome caricature of the Rabbi in his Chumash, he's pretty much doing the worst possible thing you could possibly do in a yeshiva: defiling a sacred book while making fun of a spiritual leader. What a rebel. This act of rebellion, unconscious though it may seem, is a way for Asher to assert himself as an individual. He is doing something nobody else would do, and he's doing it with his art.
Quote #2
What is so terrible about Vienna? I felt myself trembling. I love this street. Yes. I don't want to go into exile. But I'll draw another street. Streets are all the same. Oh, they're not. They're not the same. I don't know enough about this street to really draw it yet; how can I draw a strange street in a foreign land full of people who hate me? Why should I even want to draw such a street? (126.2)
Asher's struggle against his parents' desire to move to Vienna is the first real instance of him asserting his individualism in the book. By refusing to comply with the status quo, our young hero demonstrates that he's no average and obedient son. Ruh-roh. Bonus: staying home from Vienna is basically what makes his growth as an artist possible.
Quote #3
I was going into a huge gray stone building and I remembered none of the drawings had been of my father. Not a single drawing in that sketchbook was of my father. There were huge glass doors bordered in bronze and a marble interior and someone at a counter talking to me, looking at me curiously and pointing up a marble staircase. I climbed the stairs. (138.2-139.1)
After the mashpia asks Asher to fill a notebook of sketches, Asher wanders out of the yeshiva to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he gives himself a little education in art history. Asher is asserting himself as an individual here because he's rejecting the mashpia's—and his father's—authority while pursuing his own interests.