Mark Helprin Quotes & Sayings

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

Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that you will be thirsty, and you take water. — Mark Helprin

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

It is said that marriage is a long war between ancient families trapped in close proximity by lust. — Mark Helprin

The best thing to do was to stop it while he still could, since it was something that would lead nowhere, painfully. — Mark Helprin

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

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

The eighth and ninth floors housed the library. It had several million volumes in open stacks, all the major newspapers and periodicals either bound or on computer, and a map section. Expert librarians maneuvered a seemingly limitless budget to keep it well maintained and up-to-date. The reference collections were wonders of the world. — Mark Helprin

No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind. — Mark Helprin

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

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

But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn't know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look — Mark Helprin

A cat is an excuse for a lonely woman to talk to herself. That's what a cat is. — Mark Helprin

When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war. — Mark Helprin

Somewhat unnerved by what he felt were Germanic currents in a man whom he had taken to be just an Italian intellectual who ate flowers, Strassnitzky cautiously argued that "the records are secret, part of the War Office. How do you expect to match the number with the man?" "I haven't the slightest idea," Alessandro said, almost arrogantly, "but God is directly in charge of all things relating to life and death. That I've learned in the war." "You think God is going to get you the operations records of the Austrian army?" "I don't know, but if He were, wouldn't you imagine that the first thing He'd do would be to have me conveyed to Vienna? — Mark Helprin

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

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

The last time the Right Honourable Gentleman raised the accusation about the policies of this government forcing his constituents to resort to inedible foods - in that case, as I remember, it was ants, earwigs, and glowworms - the National Health looked very seriously into the matter, and their inspectors. . . ." "Division! Division!" cried out some who had got the scent of blood, and Mallet Scuffs himself, successfully diverted, cried out, "Weevils, too! Weevils and grubs!" "Their inspectors. . . ." "Weevils, too, weevils and grubs! Weevils, too, weevils and grubs!" chanted a Marxist anti-missile faction. — Mark Helprin

Humankind, or at least American-kind, will lose its edge as we produce more and more pipsqueaks and everyone gets nicer. Whole generations of pipsqueaks will be so fucking nice you won't be able to tell a man from a woman ... And it will get worse and worse as people mistake nice for good. HItler was nice, supposedly, most of the time. A lot of good that did ... — Mark Helprin

They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves. "I love you," they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate. — Mark Helprin

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

I'm a critic. I write essays about works of art. It's like being a eunuch in the seraglio, but unrequited love is the sweetest, and I have the proper distance. I can compress the qualities of beauty I've been trained to see, store them up, and bring them out at will, rapid-fire, in the combinations I want. — Mark Helprin

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

I used to write exclusively with one particular Montblanc fountain pen, although lately I have had to use a roller-tip fountain pen, because I find it harder and harder to control the fine muscles of my right hand during prolonged periods of work. I buy boxes of Deluxe Uni-ball pens, use them until they start to drag, and then change. — Mark Helprin

The greatest fight is when you are fighting in the smoke and cannot see with your eyes. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

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

I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from what I'm used to. Take any American city, in autumn, or in winter, when the light makes the colors dance and flow, and look at it from a distant hill or from a boat in the bay or on the river, and you will see in any section of the view far better paintings than in this lentil soup that you people have to pedigree in order to love. I may be a thief, but I know color when I see it in the flash of heaven or in the Devil's opposing tricks, and I know mud. Mr. Knoedler, you needn't worry about your paintings anymore. I'm not going to steal them. I don't like them.
Sincerely yours,
P. Soames — Mark Helprin

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

You will most appreciate 'Freddy and Fredericka' if you are familiar with the story of the Fall, the Good Hermit, 'Tom Jones,' 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'Paradise Lost,' 'Henry V,' and 'My Cousin Vinny.' That doesn't mean that you can't enjoy or understand it on an emotional level, free of all allusion, which is the test of any book of fiction. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

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

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. — Mark Helprin

And she speculated that the city would be cold, completely of itself, unconscious, that its every move would be transcendent, and that each of its hundred million flashing scenes would strike a moral lesson.
Such a city would extend vision, intensify pity, telescope emotion, and float the heart the way the sea is gently buoyant with great ships. To do this it would have to be a cold instrument. And, despite its beauty, it would have to be cruel. — Mark Helprin

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

You know," said Al in a daze of hunger and cold, "when you see this, you realize that despite all the crap that goes on in the cities, despite all the words and accusations, the country has balance and momentum. The whole thing is symmetrical and beautiful; it works. The cities are like bulbs on a Christmas tree. They may bum, swell, and shatter, but the green stays green. Look at it," he said, eyes fixed on the horizon, not unmoved by the motion of the train. "Look at it. It's alive. — Mark Helprin

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

In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom. — Mark Helprin

She was exquisite, and he feared that he was blinded to everything else, that he was drawn to her by weakness, that his passion for her was incomplete. Know ing all too well the deeply religious love of the Italian poets for women they had merely seen on the street, he feared that his infatuation for Lia could never be compared to the elemental union that can occur between men and women when God is present and light surrounds them. — Mark Helprin

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

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

Unlike Hezbollah, Israel's more modest aim is to survive, and that it has done. — Mark Helprin

The intellect is of no use unless it's disciplined by the mortification of the flesh, so that it may serve the soul. That's all. The intellect thinks. The body dances. And the spirit sings. A song, a simple song. When love and memory are overwhelming, and the soul, though crushed, takes flight, it does so in a simple song. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

I was put in charge, made a general, and sent into Serbia, where, by dint of my own ingenuity, we served honorably but did not kill a soul. And that, believe me, is very hard with the Serbs, because they are very ingenious themselves, and they have a passion for martyrdom. "I've been a field marshal for two years. I have so many medals that when I wear them I look like a window in a junk shop. — Mark Helprin

to defeat pain he had to separate it from time, its most useful ally. — Mark Helprin

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

Humanity requires for its understanding and governance not science but art, — Mark Helprin

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

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

The first was that it was almost impossible to get. The second, that, once you had it, it was almost impossible to keep. The third, that these laws applied only to each individual but not to anyone else. In other words, though money was impossible to get and impossible to keep, for everyone else it flowed in by the bucketful and stayed forever. — Mark Helprin

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

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

What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love? — Mark Helprin

We like it the way it is. We're enjoying the oscillating balances, the ongoing war between good and evil, the wonderful small triumphs of the soul. Perhaps it's too soon to end all that. Perhaps we need some more time to think things out. — Mark Helprin

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

Souls are complicated things. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not — Mark Helprin

To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love. — Mark Helprin

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

Little men," he once said, "spend their days in pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. I've seen them die. They fall away as if they have been pushed, and the expressions on their faces are those of the most unbelieving surprise. Not so, the man who knows the virtues and lives by them. The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God. — Mark Helprin

You can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. — Mark Helprin

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

How, in good conscience," Alessandro asked, "can you ride across the countryside in perfect safety, as if you were on holiday, stopping mainly to swim and eat oysters, while men are crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches?" "Because the object of war is peace, and I have merely thrown out the middle. If everyone did the same, no one would be crushed and pulverized in the filth of the trenches." "Everyone doesn't have the privilege. You do because you're a field marshal in command of a microscopic unit." "I realize that," Strassnitzky answered, "and, given such a rare opportunity, of which most men cannot even dream, I would be unforgivably remiss if I failed to seize it, would I not? I exploit it to the full. — Mark Helprin

Because two propositions can be true at once," he said. "Because the world is imperfect. Because we are imperfect. Because sometimes we're called upon to do terrible things. And because we define ourselves in dying, which is," he indicated by motioning with his head toward the arena, "what this is. Give us at least that. — Mark Helprin

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

I like the race, rather than the winning.
Do you really?
Yes, I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road. — Mark Helprin

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

Mrs. Gamely had gotten a letter through, inviting them to visit as soon as they could, and reporting that, in these years just before the millennium Lake of the Coheeries had had had hard winters
yes
but also extraordinary summers which had made the village overflow with natural wealth, "in the agrarian and lexicographical senses of the word. There is so much food, everywhere," her friend had written for her, "and so many new and wonderful words being generated, that the storehouses and closets are overflowing. We are tubflooded with neologisms, smoked fish, and fruit pies. — Mark Helprin

If you don't have compassion you won't be compelled to help. — Mark Helprin

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

For example, they recently had a piece on a character
I think his name was Ambrosio D'Urbervilles
whose "design statement" was to stuff an entire apartment from floor to ceiling with dark purple cottonballs. He called it "Portrait of a Dead Camel Dancing on the Roof of a Steambath. — Mark Helprin

It soon got so cold that the men rushed to close the doors. When they had shut them and the room was again silent, they saw that several women had begun to cry. The women said it was because of the numbing air that had washed over their bare shoulders, but even strangers embraced sadly as they coasted into the new year and felt its strength commencing. They cried because of the magic and the contradictions; because time had passed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers' pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges? — Mark Helprin

Guariglia went to his children, who were playing by the brazier. "Look at them," he said. "I know they may not be as beautiful to you as they are to me ... "
"They are," Alessandro interrupted.
"No," Guariglia insisted, "they're not beautiful in that way, but to me, Alessandro, they are all that is good and holy. I didn't know God until I saw them. It's funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens. — Mark Helprin

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

I have jumped out of airplanes but I was not technically a paratrooper. I was an infantryman and a night fighter, anti-terrorist. — Mark Helprin

I returned to the university only after the Second World War, and, even then, not having been in the resistance, I had political difficulties." "Why weren't you in the resistance?" "I was tired. And you have to have a certain temperament. You have to be fixed on the point. You need what politicians have, which is the absence of a sense of mortality. It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference. Revolutionaries get it from dreams. They say that nothing is apolitical, that politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart. I say, fuck them. — Mark Helprin

People in my constituency are starving and born with sixteen fingers. Did you ever eat weasel shish-kebob? Freddy doesn't walk by the side of the motorways to gather dandelions for his salad, but the people who sent me here do. Why are we supporting him? He doesn't deserve it. The Tories won't give milk to children who go to school hungry and come home to baked cat. — Mark Helprin

You're crazy," Ludovico announced. Alessandro held his finger in the air. "Ah!" he said, "but at least I'm able to tell you my last name, and at least, when they take me out to the stake my dreams may be just beginning, whereas yours, by your own definition, must and will come to a dark end." "You fool yourself. Your illusions will fall away even before the end. They won't do you any good. You'll see. — Mark Helprin