Mark Helprin Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

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.

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
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
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
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
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
Never in his life had Alessandro had to squint in starlight, but now the stars were so bright that at times he had to cover his eyes, and when they burned too brilliantly for keeping still, they sometimes shot across the sky in short bursts. Though these quiet illuminations vanished almost as soon as they had started, they lingered in the eye's inexact memory of their luminescent paths. Perhaps had they been stronger and more constant, and hung in a dull white line, Alessandro's heart would not have risen each time he saw them. They were less than little puffs of smoke, their tracks thinner than a hair, the bursts of light mainly a matter of memory.

Mark Helprin
How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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