Mark Helprin Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
The tail of the white horse swished back and forth as he trotted down empty avenues and boulevards. 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
To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been. And to protect their delicate vision of that other time, madmen will justify their condition with touching loyalty, and surround it with a thousand distractive schemes.

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

Mark Helprin
The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.

Mark Helprin
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.

Mark Helprin
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
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
We are all perfect clocks that the Divinity has set to ticking when, even before birth, the heart explodes into its lifelong dance.

Mark Helprin
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
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
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
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
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
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 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've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better.

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

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
I write because it is a way of glimpsing the truth. And I write to create something of beauty.

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
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