Mark Helprin Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Helprin