Mark Helprin Quotes

The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, ...

The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with paint...

My father was famous for his photographic memory. He was in the OSS. They trained him to be captured...

Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.

I work with a great deal of discipline, although I usually take on more than I can handle and often ...

The ones who are always on your side, or so they think, are the ones who keep you down. Everything t...

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagina...

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funn...

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't te...

Mr. de Pinto, the dog who protects sheep quickly learns how to direct them, and it becomes a habit. ...

Adversity has its compensations, that in falling, and in failing, we rise. It is as if there is a ha...

You can't expect anyone to trust revelation if he hasn't experienced it himself. Those who haven't o...

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

No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have...

The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, chang...

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

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in ...

He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it w...

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

Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, a...

In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers...

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel...

Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.

As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have...

I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Withou...

I've given myself to you. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the...

In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to...

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

I was brought up,' Freddy informed him, 'not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all type...

Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you alw...

I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more co...

But you won’t abdicate."Of course not. It’s my duty to go on, to maintain the line. I can’t possibly...

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

Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a boo...

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

...what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?

They had taken to the movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this ven...

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summe...

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in whic...

Small scenes can be so beautiful that they change a man forever.

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, de...

She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.

Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dor...

Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and ...

Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants h...

If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait un...

No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sente...

At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and pe...

I don't want these. They're mud and they've got no color. Or at least the color is different from wh...

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

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed...

He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps mo...

Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.

The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are ofte...

I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and i...

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived...

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on t...

Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the ...

I see no justice in that plan.""Who said," lashed out Isaac Penn, "that you, a man, can always perce...

But little else could deter Craig Binky, for he believed that everything about him was destined to b...

My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a lo...