Mark Helprin famous quotes

Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.
-- Mark Helprin

#Beautiful #Art #Memories

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.
-- Mark Helprin

#Beautiful #Horse #Truth

I have been fighting over commas all my life.
-- Mark Helprin

#Fighting

We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings.
-- Mark Helprin

#Art #Kings #Stars

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

#Cat #White #Rooms

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.
-- Mark Helprin

#Art #Kentucky #Ideas

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.
-- Mark Helprin

#Expression #Silence #Wells

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

#Book #Soul #Mules

They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.
-- Mark Helprin

#Stars #Way #Resistance

To see the beauty of the world is to put your hands on lines that run uninterrupted through life and through death. Touching them is an act of hope, for perhaps someone on the other side, if there is another side, is touching them, too.
-- Mark Helprin

#Running #Hands #Touching

If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.
-- Mark Helprin

#Love Is #Thinking

There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
-- Mark Helprin

#Lakes #Justice #World

As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours.
-- Mark Helprin

#Giving Up #Believe #Heart

He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.
-- Mark Helprin

#Beautiful #Strong #Singing

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

#Coffee #Espresso #Soul

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

#Life #Sleep #Years

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

#Dream #Just A Dream

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.
-- Mark Helprin

#Taken #Winter #Vanity

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

#Song #Long #Political

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.
-- Mark Helprin

#Air #Discovery #Two

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

#Love #Laughter #Lakes

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

#Rushing #Water #Alive

...this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance between rebellion and obedience, is God's own signature on earth.
-- Mark Helprin

#Perfect #Joy #Balance

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.
-- Mark Helprin

#Fighting #Justice #World

Perhaps passing through the gates of death is like passing quietly through the gate in a pasture fence. On the other side, you keep walking, without the need to look back. No shock, no drama, just the lifting of a plank or two in a simple wooden gate in a clearing. Neither pain, nor floods of light, nor great voices, but just the silent crossing of a meadow.
-- Mark Helprin

#Death #Prayer #Pain

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

#Beautiful #Liars #Lying

If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined.
-- Mark Helprin

#Simple #Answers #Determined

Not surprisingly, he began to sing, and because no one in the world could hear him, and he sang without inhibition, he sang well.
-- Mark Helprin

#World #Wells #Inhibitions

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

#Clever #Soul #Requirements

Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand - until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence.
-- Mark Helprin

#Talking #Common Sense #Justice

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

#Law #Cities #Promise

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

#New York #Careers #People

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.
-- Mark Helprin

#Grace #Pages #Fiction

When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion.
-- Mark Helprin

#Matter #Energy #Proportion

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

#Waiting #Stories #Return

How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.
-- Mark Helprin

#Beautiful #Past #Light

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

#Real #Mistake #Boys

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

#Stupid #Differences #Curiosity

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

#Book #Ideas #Making Money

I've never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can't even remain in the same room with coffee.
-- Mark Helprin

#Coffee #Rooms #Cups

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

#Children #Growing Up #Odds

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.
-- Mark Helprin

#Stars #Dark #Light

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

#Dirty #Heaven #Black

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.
-- Mark Helprin

#Sadness #Mad #Joy

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

#Sadness #Judging #Joy

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

#Use #Pages #Rich

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile.
-- Mark Helprin

#Dark #Guarantees #Worthwhile

The treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter and love.
-- Mark Helprin

#Laughter #Movement #Treasure

And how does God speak to you?" "In the language of everything that is beautiful.
-- Mark Helprin

#Beautiful #Doe #Language

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

#Country #Storm #Speech

I'm not afraid," Rafi said. "Why not?" "If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.
-- Mark Helprin

#Useless #Today #Why Not

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

#Forever #Fool #Would Be

All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.
-- Mark Helprin

#Running #Sea #Rivers

...to be paid for one's joy is to steal.
-- Mark Helprin

#Joy #Stealing

A lot of people hate heroes. I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead—then they’re really cool.
-- Mark Helprin

#Real #Hate #Hero

She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.
-- Mark Helprin

#Sleep #Years #Used

Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.
-- Mark Helprin

#Dream #Children #Memories

Truth is no rounder than a horse's eye.
-- Mark Helprin

#Horse #Eye #Truth Is

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

#Privilege #Body #Portions

New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.
-- Mark Helprin

#Fighting #Technology #Sea

Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare upreaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run. And what it did to Northern forests can hardly be described, considering that it iced the branches of the sycamores on Chrystie Street and swept them back and forth until they rang like ranks of bells.
-- Mark Helprin

#Love #Beautiful #Running

I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart.
-- Mark Helprin

#Lonely #War #Moving

'Freeing' a literary work into the public domain is less a public benefit than a transfer of wealth from the families of American writers to the executives and stockholders of various businesses who will continue to profit from, for example, 'The Garden Party,' while the descendants of Katherine Mansfield will not.
-- Mark Helprin

#Party #Garden #Example

Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.
-- Mark Helprin

#New York #Writing #Careers

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

#Rainy Day #Finding Yourself #Enemy

Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.
-- Mark Helprin

#Editors #People #World

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

#Taken #Eye #Vulnerable

As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.
-- Mark Helprin

#Winter #Darkness #Cheerful

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

#Loss #Balance #Want

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.
-- Mark Helprin

#Running #Lonely #Laughter

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

#Beautiful #Night #Hands

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

#Horse #Oats #Tree

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

#Beautiful #Cities #Sight

and even when I was broken the way sometimes one can be broken, and even though I had fallen, I found upon arising that I was stronger than before, that the glories, if I may call them that, which I had loved so much and that had been darkened in my fall, were shinning even brighter and nearly everytime subsequently I have fallen and darkness has come over me, they have obstinately arisen, not as they were, but brighter.
-- Mark Helprin

#Fall #Broken #Darkness

When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
-- Mark Helprin

#Fear #Spaghetti

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.
-- Mark Helprin

#Animal #Wind #Imagination

He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn and he loved her.
-- Mark Helprin

#Half #Dawn #Naked

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." Memoir From Antproof Case
-- Mark Helprin

#Thinking #Life Is #Cases

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.
-- Mark Helprin

#Bridges #Cities #Justice

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

#Beautiful #Hands #Play

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.
-- Mark Helprin

#Real #Crazy #Book

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

#Summer #Country #Travel

You’ll join me sooner than you know in a place with . . . no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound--where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky.
-- Mark Helprin

#Beautiful #Color #Sky

Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.
-- Mark Helprin

#War #Thinking #Wind

A good river is nature's life work in song.
-- Mark Helprin

#Song #Rivers

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

#Race #Perfection #Victory

...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

#Strength #Real #Blue