Top 100 Mark Helprin Quotes
#1. To the sight of the swallows dying in mid air, Alessandro was finally able to add his own benediction. "Dear God, I beg of you only one thing. Let me join the ones I love. Carry me to them, unite me with them, let me see them, let me touch them." And then it all ran together, like a song.
Mark Helprin
#2. As I understand it, miracles come to those who risk defeat in seeking them. They come to those who have exhausted themselves completely in a struggle to accomplish the impossible.
Mark Helprin
#3. One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning.
Mark Helprin
#4. 'Creative Commons' is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like kibbutz on the Internet, the idea is to write programs - 'free ware' - and distribute them without charge.
Mark Helprin
#5. Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.
Mark Helprin
#6. Though builders may build, in the main they follow the plans of architects. Teachers teach, but they must have a text. Politicians govern, but only upon the flow of commentary that raises them up or casts them down.
Mark Helprin
#7. To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love.
Mark Helprin
#8. Though he had spoken of the subject many times, in the silence of his room he added the powerful kind of phrasing that would not have occurred to him as he spoke, because it's origins were in the collaboration of hand and pen.
Mark Helprin
#9. Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.
Mark Helprin
#10. That's writing, huh. What does it do?" "It's like talking, but it makes no sound.
Mark Helprin
#11. What I did with his automobile was fairly dramatic and somewhat risky, but still a lot easier than finding a parking place on the Upper East Side.
Mark Helprin
#12. If Shakespeare thought comedy worthwhile, that means the rest of us can take a break from tragedy now and then without betraying our calling, even if the modern professional intellectual, a poseur by nature, has yet to discover this.
Mark Helprin
#13. I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.
Mark Helprin
#14. One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't.
Mark Helprin
#15. In the Freudian age, parents say to their children, 'Don't be defensive,' meaning, 'You have no argument,' but I was born in the age of Rommel, when defense was considered an honorable thing.
Mark Helprin
#16. I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It's up to you. No you is educated who cannot educate himself.
Mark Helprin
#17. For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.
Mark Helprin
#18. The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.
Mark Helprin
#19. Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.
Mark Helprin
#20. The room, as she saw it, was a web of motion, a symphony of mischievou dancing particles quite like the smooth and placid notes of a fine concerto.
Mark Helprin
#21. No one knows better than I that it's all here, and need not be explained or interpreted - just seized.
Mark Helprin
#22. I was raised on the Hudson, in a house that had been the stable of the financier and Civil War general Brayton Ives. In midcentury, we had fire pits in the floor for heating, and rats everywhere, because they nested in the hay insulation.
Mark Helprin
#23. The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road.
Mark Helprin
#24. Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.
Mark Helprin
#25. I knew it was easier to drill things in than to take them out.'
'It's like a screw!' Craig-Vyvyan shouted.... 'If you pull off it's head, you never get it out.
Mark Helprin
#26. Potatoes have much more staying power than caviar.
Mark Helprin
#27. At this instant, Alessandro was electrified, as if lightning had struck the telephone wire or Saint Elmo's fire had filled the room, for part of the dream that he could not recall had come back to him with full force.
Mark Helprin
#28. Life is so quick that it's all played out at the gates of death, and the value of resolution is that it quickens life.
Mark Helprin
#30. Because no windows were open and the air was so still and cold that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead.
Mark Helprin
#31. What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love?
Mark Helprin
#32. The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.
Mark Helprin
#33. They had taken to the movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this venture of the Jews prove successful, the new state would be filled with dancers and musicians, but especially dancers, for dancing like nothing else says: I am still alive.
Mark Helprin
#34. He wanted more than anything in the world to embrace her. But it seemed out of the question. Then she turned to him and stretched out her arms. And he went to her as if he had been born for it.
Mark Helprin
#35. They're not just dreams. Not anymore, I dream more than I wake now, and, at times, I have crossed over. Can't you see? I've been there.
Mark Helprin
#36. In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom.
Mark Helprin
#37. And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, you have only one life, you have only one life.
Mark Helprin
#38. Don't worry about things that you simply cannot know. Let them fall back and recede like the foam pushed aside by the flanks of a ship. Leave them behind and let your heart power on.
Mark Helprin
#39. For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse.
Mark Helprin
#40. And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city's hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.
Mark Helprin
#42. His name was Peter Lake, and he said to himself out loud, You're in bad shape when a horse takes pity on you, you stupid bastard,
Mark Helprin
#43. I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that firmed to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.
Mark Helprin
#44. Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of molybdenum steel which extended into the wall for five feet.
Mark Helprin
#45. Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.
Mark Helprin
#46. Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
Mark Helprin
#47. They were already in love and both of them knew it, but for both it was too fast.
Mark Helprin
#48. When people ask me why is 'Winter's Tale' a fantasy, I point out that it is not a fantasy.
Mark Helprin
#49. One of the things I worked very hard on all my life was to be like everyone else. I tried very hard to fit in.
Mark Helprin
#50. They knew that to survive in Manhattan he would have to know something of bitterness before he arrived.
Mark Helprin
#51. He heard the Baymen tell of war, but they never said it could be harnessed, its head held down, and made to run in place.
Mark Helprin
#52. At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.
Mark Helprin
#53. A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.
Mark Helprin
#54. to cite Montaigne, "Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves."125
Mark Helprin
#55. They got up steam and proceeded calmly to the north - where there seemed to be no people, but only mountains, lakes, reedy snow-filled steppes, and winter gods who played with storms and stars.
Mark Helprin
#56. The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
Mark Helprin
#57. He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.
Mark Helprin
#58. Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking.
Mark Helprin
#59. In living, one muddles through the years for the sake of those one or two moments which are indisputably great.
Mark Helprin
#60. The spark of life is not gain. Nor is it luxury. The spark of life is movement. Color. Love. And furthermore ... if you really want to enjoy life, you must work quietly and humbly to realize your delusions of grandeur.
Mark Helprin
#61. Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
Mark Helprin
#62. Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.
Mark Helprin
#63. I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.
Mark Helprin
#64. But each time he received an invitation from the Harvard Club to join ... he postponed his application for the time when he could do little but rest in the kind of comfortable chair that is to the end of life what a cradle is to the beginning. Pg 55
Mark Helprin
#65. Heavy blizzards start as a gentle and persistent snow.
Mark Helprin
#66. The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.
Mark Helprin
#67. But in the end he was so tired and hungry that, rather than walk to Utah, he decided to take his chances in a moss-and-puffball suit on a shock pancake thrown into the air by a giant catapult. Besides, the thing was insanely alluring.
Mark Helprin
#68. If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind.
Mark Helprin
#69. She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.
Mark Helprin
#70. He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.
Mark Helprin
#71. The voodoo priest and all his powders were as nothing compared to espresso, cappuccino, and mocha, which are stronger than all the religions of the world combined, and perhaps stronger than the human soul itself.
Mark Helprin
#72. As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.
Mark Helprin
#73. I wanted the music to be full, to surround us, to lift us like the swell, so I rented a bloody orchestra. You only live once.
Mark Helprin
#74. Give me a night by the fire, with a book in my hand, not that flickering rectangular son of a bitch that sits screaming in every living room in the land.
Mark Helprin
#75. but, as we know, even when the silver wears away and you're left with copper, if you attend to it every day it has a gleam all its own.
Mark Helprin
#76. This marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance between rebellion and obedience, is God's own signature on earth.
Mark Helprin
#77. Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not
Mark Helprin
#78. Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.
Mark Helprin
#79. an old man with a cane may discover that his many years have added nothing to his innocence but proof and explanation, and that, as much as he may have learned in his long life, he cannot see as far as he could see when he was seven
Mark Helprin
#80. They always say about the soldier that he's detached. That's true, for he's been in the eye of the storm, his heart has been broken, and he doesn't even know it.
Mark Helprin
#81. Barnes & Noble is able to publish price-reduced non-copyrighted works not so much because it saves the 10 percent to 15 percent of revenue that would go to the gruel-eating authors, but because it saves the 50 percent that would go to the publishers.
Mark Helprin
#82. The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.
Mark Helprin
#83. It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.
Mark Helprin
#84. Battle - a sense that time does not exist, that he himself was of no account, that all things were connected and orchestrated far beyond human will, and that the world was saturated with beauty no matter what the loss.
Mark Helprin
#85. There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it ...
Mark Helprin
#86. The best thing in the world is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner.
Mark Helprin
#87. And they'll vote for me because I'm the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.
Mark Helprin
#88. All great discoveries," the elder Marratta had once said, "are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents." At
Mark Helprin
#89. On my last ride on the RR train I looked almost as lovingly at the faces and expressions of my fellow passengers as if I were staring a a photograph of times long past. They did not know that they made a photograph. They did not understand the vanishing background of their lives ...
Mark Helprin
#90. The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.
Mark Helprin
#91. Her eyes showed that though she may have decided to regret him, as long as he was in her presence she could not.
Mark Helprin
#92. How just it would be if for our final reward we were to be made the masters of time, and if those we love could come alive again not just in memory, but in truth.
Mark Helprin
#93. No," De Roos said. "You mustn't thank me. The relatives of patients thank the physician as if the physician were God. It's no good, and if the patient dies it turns to ash - not just for them, but, as you can imagine, for me. I'll see you later.
Mark Helprin
#94. In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.
Mark Helprin
#95. If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.
Mark Helprin
#96. HERE AT THE GOLDEN GATE IS THE ETERNAL RAINBOW THAT HE CONCEIVED AND SET TO FORM. A PROMISE INDEED THAT THE RACE OF MAN SHALL ENDURE INTO THE AGES. Like
Mark Helprin
#97. Music was a chain forged half of silences and half of sound, love was nothing without longing and loss, and were time not to have at its end the absence of time, and the absence of time not to have been preceded by time, neither would be of any consequence.
Mark Helprin
#98. Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.
Mark Helprin
#99. The difference between classes of men is that the vast majority remember youth as their glory, and the tiniest fraction, in escaping a life of drudgery and increasing difficulty, finds something even better.
Mark Helprin
#100. They were dancing around the fountain, arm in arm, in an old Dutch dance, their cheeks touching, their hands entwined. They had no music; they hummed. And there was no reason for them to be dancing that Peter Lake could see, except that it was an exceptionally beautiful night.
Mark Helprin
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