Helprin Mark 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

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

And I love you.' she said her heart buoyant. She really did love him, although each time she said it and he could not reply, she loved him perhaps a little less. — Mark Helprin

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

These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds. — Mark Helprin

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

You see," the attorney Giuliani said, "not only is there no comfort in unanimity, but they cannot even achieve it." "I could unify them." "That's silly, Alessandro. If they supported you, or even listened, it would be because you flattened yourself and your ideas until everything that once was steep and noble was gone. — 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

When finally the sky grew ink-black, the trees were visible only as their swaying branches blotted out the stars that crossed in blazing showers, as sometimes they do. The language of the stars, seldom read and heeded less, told beautifully and in silence of all the victories that had ever been won and all the defeats ever suffered. In uncountable lines of light across the widest sphere, the stars spoke of everything notable even down to a leaf blowing rhythmically in the wind. — Mark Helprin

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

What is apparent is not always what is true. — Mark Helprin

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

Mortality is like the cold. It cannot be altered by human conceit or solidarity, and at the end you will be on your knees, in shock and amazement, and then you'll have only one sword, one shield, one great thing to carry you through." Alessandro waited to hear what that was, but his father would not say. "If you don't discover it yourself, it will be nothing more than an exhortation from me. — Mark Helprin

Peter Lake spurred the horse again, and extended his right arm like a lance, pointing it at the motionless officer. As they went by in a blur of white, he lifted the man's cap from his head, saying, "Allow me to take your hat." The enraged policeman pivoted, took out his notebook, and furiously wrote a description of the horse's buttocks. — Mark Helprin

Then occurred a rare thing about which men and women sometimes dream. They carried on a full conversation in complete silence, discerning feelings, plans, exclamations, jokes, opinions, laughter, and dreams- rapidly, silently, inexplicably. — 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

Hoheit, do you know why crows are black?" "No, I never thought of it." "They taste lousy, and they're black as a sure sign to predators that they're crows, who will taste lousy." "Why aren't they yellow?" "They live in cold climates, and black absorbs heat. They don't need camouflage, so they can take advantage of the way their color soaks up the sunlight." "Why do you ask me these questions?" Klodwig demanded. "To remind you, Hoheit, not to argue with nature. — 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

We have been so enthusiastic in our welcome as to be obsequious - to machines. — Mark Helprin

Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful. — Mark Helprin

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

Not a single illegal immigrant should or need enter the United States, not one. Contrary to the common wisdom, the borders are easy to seal, and controlling entry is hardly totalitarian. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I'm grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion. — Mark Helprin

He was able to find the intensity and beauty that he wanted, in the plung itself. Physical forces in a complicated coalition of gravity, acceleration, and temperature were powerful and intense enough to satisfy him. It made sense. Nothing was as comforting as the enduring purity of elemental forces, and returning to them could not mean defeat. But he never thought that he would die in a bark suit, strapped to a shock pancake, next to an incompetent midget. — Mark Helprin

My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured on purpose and to read upside down and backwards and commit to memory every document in Germany he saw as he was being interrogated - every schedule on every wall. So, that photographic memory somehow made its way to me when I was young. — Mark Helprin

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

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

But little else could deter Craig Binky, for he believed that everything about him was destined to be triumphal. Harry Penn was certain that in his nearly one hundred years he had never encountered a soul more intensely marinated in self-satisfaction. Craig Binky's pomposity was often relieved, for others, by what Harry Penn generously termed Mr. Binky's somewhat inexact intelligence. — 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

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

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

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

For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse. — Mark Helprin

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

Truth is not anchored to the ground by driven piles. It can float and take to the air; it is light and lovely and delicate. It is feminine as well as masculine. It is often gentle, and sometimes it can even make a fool of itself - but when it does it calls down God (who protects weak creatures), and suddenly its foolishness becomes a blazing, piercing light. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

Souls are complicated things. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

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

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

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

The best thing in the world is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner. — Mark Helprin

If all the months and all their days could be like June weather in New York, there would be paradise on earth. Often, in early June, momentous decisions are made, power waxes strong, quick wars are fought, and love affairs are begun and ended. — 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 they rolled over the marshes before Venice, he fell back in his seat, windburnt and exhausted, and noticed that the bottle of water, but for its slight and elegant blue tint, was the smoothest, clearest, and most transparent thing he had ever seen. All that was reflected in it was sharp, subdued, and calm. The fields outside, beyond the reeds; the reeds themselves, waving green and yellow; the water, shockingly blue in north light, were clarified, compressed, and preserved within the lens. And if bottles of mineral water could pacify the light of mountains, fields, and the sea, to what painful mysteries would the lens of beauty be opaque? Even death, Alessandro thought, would yield to beauty - if not in fact then in explanation - for the likeness of every great question could be found in forms as simple as songs, and there, if not explicable, they were at least perfectly apprehensible. — 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

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium. — Mark Helprin

[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

Marriages are made in heaven which is why they cause so much trouble on earth. — Mark Helprin

I knew even before I had desire that it would be gnarled and knotted, black and hard, a tree that would never bear fruit, a fish that would never jump, a cat that would never meow. All my life, bitterness and regret, bitterness, and regret. "And yet," he said, briefly closing his eyes, "I was able to imagine the softness and sweetness of love, for a time." He rested his head upon his right hand, in a gesture worthy of a classical actor, and everyone in the Teatro Barbarossa heard his breathing. — 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

When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead - in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once. — 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

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

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

Watching the children, he noticed two things especially. A girl of about five, and her sister, who was no more than three, wanted to drink from the pebbled concrete fountain at the playground's edge, but it was too high for either of them, so the five-year-old ... jumped up and, resting her stomach on the edge and grasping the sides, began to drink. But she was neither strong enough nor oblivious enough of the pain to hand on, and she began to slip off backward. At this, the three-year-old ... advanced to her sister and, also grasping the edge of the fountain, placed her forehead against her sister's behind, straining to hold her in place, eyes closed, body trembling, curls spilling from her cap. Her sister drank for a long time, held in position by an act as fine as Harry had ever seen on the battlefields of Europe. Pg 32 — Mark Helprin

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

A good river is nature's life work in song. — 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

A cat can outrace the best thoroughbred horse if only it can grasp the idea of racing. — 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

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. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you. — Mark Helprin

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

In a thousand years," Alessandro said, "this incident will be remembered. By then, of course, we will have become angels, devils, or a dragon that breathes fire ... but we have given this rock a story that will be passed on."
"What good is that?"
"It isn't to our advantage, if that's what you mean. However, it's pleasurable to cast a line into the future, no matter how tenuously. You never know, the line may be unbroken all the way to the last judgment. — Mark Helprin

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys. — Mark Helprin

Shall I show you the half-dozen other rooms in this hospital where these scenes are repeated? And what of the other hospitals? Printing House Square is small and tame. Even in the private institutions uptown you can see a show just like this: there is nothing as disgusting as an obese cadaver in which all the futile pleasures of many years finally arise to fill it full-blown with stinking rotten gases. The city is burning and under siege. And we are in a war in which everyone is killed and no one is remembered."
"What am I supposed to do, then," Peter Lake asked, "if it's like you say?"
"Is there someone you love?"
"Yes."
"A woman?"
"Yes."
"Then go home to her."
"And who will remember her?"
"No one. That's just the point. You must take care of all that now. — Mark Helprin

They glanced over at Catherine, who was dancing with Billy, as only fathers and daughters can dance. No matter how old the daughter may be, the father is dancing, in joy unparalleled, with his child when she was little. — Mark Helprin

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

If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children. — 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 greatest blizzards start with the finest snow. — Mark Helprin

To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices. — Mark Helprin

I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature. — Mark Helprin

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

Harry looked at Margaret and thought that, should a woman grow old, she might still have her deepest charm. Should a woman grow old, she would still be a woman, the essence of being so being so inerasable as never to vanish. And if men were to understand this as they, too, grew old, the world would be a happier place. — Mark Helprin

Evidently, rigging cables is therapy for the Swiss: or part of their theology. What was it that he used to say? A balanced arc between mountain rows / as servant to his master shows / the power of besieged belief / in something something something, something something something-something to do with ducks, or rainbows. — Mark Helprin

I know this may sound like an excuse," he said. "But tensor functions in higher differential topology, as exemplified by application of the Gauss-Bonnett Theorem to Todd Polynomials, indicate that cohometric axial rotation in nonadiabatic thermal upwelling can, by random inference derived from translational equilibrium aggregates, array in obverse transitional order the thermodynamic characteristics of a transactional plasma undergoing negative entropy conversions."
"Why don't you just shut up," said Hardesty. — Mark Helprin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear, delight, and being twenty were made for each other: — Mark Helprin