Helprin Quotes

#1. It's the devil's nectar. It's filthy and unhealthy. -Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, referring to coffee (1995)

Eugene Wells

#2. Mark Helprin and Lawrence Durrell, both of whom write fat and florid novels that appall me now but opened my eyes to the power of fiction when I was in my 20s.

Kevin Patterson

#3. A profession is like a great snake that wraps itself around you. Once you are enwrapped, you are in a slow fight for the rest of your life, and the lightness of youth leaves you.

Mark Helprin

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. They move, don't they? Who do you think sets things to moving? Nothing that moves lacks a soul.

Mark Helprin

#7. The classic business story is much like the classic human story. There is rise and fall; the overcoming of great odds, the upholding of principles despite the cost, questions of rivalry and succession, and even the possibility of descent into madness.

Mark Helprin

#8. 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

#9. '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

#10. he quickly became like so many people in New York; that is, comfortable, forgotten, and alone. Though

Mark Helprin

#11. 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

#12. The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual.

Mark Helprin

#13. My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.

Mark Helprin

#14. 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

#15. To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love.

Mark Helprin

#16. Only bad actors memorize lines. Good actors are perpetually writing them as they act.

Mark Helprin

#17. Harry understood that those left behind - the failures and the deformed, the suffering and the dead - are not just equal in soul, but that they are we and we are they. Struggle as we may for distinction, soon enough we fail, and, without exception, follow.

Mark Helprin

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. What a place to put a city, right on the front line of absolute zero. No wonder a cow burned it down.

Mark Helprin

#21. That's writing, huh. What does it do?" "It's like talking, but it makes no sound.

Mark Helprin

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. One shouldn't ever do anything to protect one's dignity. You either have it or you don't.

Mark Helprin

#26. 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

#27. How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?

Mark Helprin

#28. I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

Mark Helprin

#29. 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

#30. For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.

Mark Helprin

#31. From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.

Mark Helprin

#32. Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.

Mark Helprin

#33. Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.

Mark Helprin

#34. And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

Mark Helprin

#35. A cat is an excuse for a lonely woman to talk to herself. That's what a cat is.

Mark Helprin

#36. 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

#37. Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as he would, with neither fear nor respect.

Mark Helprin

#38. Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.

Mark Helprin

#39. All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddler's swaybacked horse. It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to venture past the tip of his tongue.

Mark Helprin

#40. 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

#41. In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance.

Mark Helprin

#42. No one knows better than I that it's all here, and need not be explained or interpreted - just seized.

Mark Helprin

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. He knew that, in the eyes of God, all things are interlinked; he knew that justice does indeed spring in great surprise from the acts and consequences of ages long forgotten; and he knew that love is not broken by time.

Mark Helprin

#46. Papa," Alessandro said, his eyes closing. "She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, when she touches it, the perfume stays.

Mark Helprin

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.

Mark Helprin

#50. I didn't know the world could be like this ... I've never seen the sky in such a passion of kindness.

Mark Helprin

#51. Potatoes have much more staying power than caviar.

Mark Helprin

#52. In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.

Mark Helprin

#53. He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.

Mark Helprin

#54. The treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter and love.

Mark Helprin

#55. For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.

Mark Helprin

#56. I suppose that's because you have faith in the judicial system that will try us." "Yes. I have faith that we will be found guilty and that we will be shot." "Your faith will be rewarded." "Why? It hasn't been for the last few years.

Mark Helprin

#57. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once.

Mark Helprin

#58. 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

#59. Off Castle Garden, a mile to the southeast, near the western edge of Governors Island, a ship lay resting through a foggy spring night before the long and arduous trip back to the old world - whether Riga, Naples, or Constantinople is not certain.

Mark Helprin

#60. 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

#61. strength floods in after a fall.

Mark Helprin

#62. 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

#63. Humanity requires for its understanding and governance not science but art,

Mark Helprin

#64. Because I don't need oxygen. I've already come to all my conclusions. I'm just slowly gliding down. Someday I'll be as light as a feather.

Mark Helprin

#65. What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love?

Mark Helprin

#66. The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes.

Mark Helprin

#67. 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

#68. I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn't get him anything other than a living.

Mark Helprin

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work.

Mark Helprin

#72. What argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?

Mark Helprin

#73. Though he was scared even to look up, much less down, he raised his hands and caught the side of the gondola. With a stream of curse words known principally to the fourth class of the Accademia San Pietro in Rome, he pulled himself back.

Mark Helprin

#74. They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and most of all, to trust.

Mark Helprin

#75. I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.

Mark Helprin

#76. In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom.

Mark Helprin

#77. They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.

Mark Helprin

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse.

Mark Helprin

#81. Many people just like to show that they're thinking the right thoughts. And as the 'right' thoughts change like the wind, so do they.

Mark Helprin

#82. 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

#83. We have been so enthusiastic in our welcome as to be obsequious - to machines.

Mark Helprin

#84. He could not have loved Virginia Gamely more, and he wondered if what he assumed lay at such great distance were present in this very city -or even in Virginia herself, if the future were to be fair and imaginative enough to take refuge in a single soul.

Mark Helprin

#85. Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.

Mark Helprin

#86. The British monarchy has the political and constitutional task of subtracting from the government and governors of Britain the papal and kingly airs that in America, because we have no such institution, unfortunately adhere to the president.

Mark Helprin

#87. When you're alone you can long so hard for something like an embrace that you mine it from the air. You find it in meanings that you might not otherwise grasp, for which it is helpful to arise early in the morning, when the mind is clear and the heart is gentle.

Mark Helprin

#88. Souls are complicated things.

Mark Helprin

#89. Albany sometimes tried to rattle, but failed to emit an audible sound.

Mark Helprin

#90. 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

#91. In an interview, I lose control even of what I am, for it is the interviewer who edits me, finally, into what he thinks I am, and never have I been happy with someone else's version of my life after that person has spent an entire two or three hours fathoming it.

Mark Helprin

#92. Your time is a good time, and though I have to leave, you can stay. How lucky you are to be in the city just before it opens its eyes upon a golden age.

Mark Helprin

#93. 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

#94. It was easy to argue with Quagliagliarello, if you had patience, and if you could pronounce his name.

Mark Helprin

#95. Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.

Mark Helprin

#96. 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

#97. It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.

Mark Helprin

#98. Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain.

Mark Helprin

#99. 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

#100. Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.

Mark Helprin