Mark Helprin Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Mark Helprin's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Novelist Mark Helprin's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 2 quotes on this page collected since June 28, 1947! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • 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 (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.72, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.290, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

  • People's position on immigration, once they get "sophisticated," and they rise to the higher levels of commentary or government, it's usually determined solely by economics. And not by anything else.

    Source: americasfuture.org
  • He knew very well that love could be like the most beautiful singing, that it could make death inconsequential, that it existed in forms so pure and strong that it was capable of reordering the universe. He knew this, and that he lacked it, and yet as he stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Venezia, watching diplomats file quietly out the gate, he was content, for he suspected that to command the profoundest love might in the end be far less beautiful a thing than to suffer its absence.

    Mark Helprin (2005). “A Soldier of the Great War”, p.155, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (1989). “Winter's Tale”, Pocket Books
  • I suppose I could read more fiction, but I haven't moved in that direction. I'd like more time even though I spend six hours a day reading. People say their eyes get tired, but I've never experienced that. In college I used to read 10 hours a day. My wife says I'm obsessive compulsive. She might have a point because when I was an undergrad student we had the required reading list and the suggested reading list. I always read all the suggested reading too.

    Source: www.bostonglobe.com
  • How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in this world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past roundedness and the dying past dying, protecting them with an image, still and bright, that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.

  • 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 (2005). “A Soldier of the Great War”, p.520, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.

    Mark Helprin (1989). “Winter's Tale”, Pocket Books
  • Truth is no rounder than a horse's eye.

    Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.59, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Not born to be rich, by 1981 I had nonetheless begun to use a PC that required for its operation the absorption of several hundred pages of protocols and the placement of very large floppy disks in the freezer to fix frequent crashes.

    "Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto". Book by Mark Helprin, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 15, 2009.
  • That's what the left is always doing. They have an ideal, and they want people to conform to it. When people don't conform to it, they end up being beaten into the mold. And beaten sometimes hard enough so that if they don't fit, then they kill them. That's what happened in the Soviet Union and China.

    Source: americasfuture.org
  • 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 (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.208, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.18, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • A lot of people hate heroes. I was criticized for portraying people who are brave, honest, loving, intelligent. That was called weak and sentimental. People who dismiss all real emotion as sentimentality are cowards. They’re afraid to commit themselves, and so they remain ‘cool’ for the rest of their lives, until they’re dead—then they’re really cool.

  • 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 (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.291, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • 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 (1989). “Winter's Tale”, Pocket Books
  • Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.

  • Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

  • I made a boy's mistake, common enough, of thinking that real life was knowing many things and many people, living dangerously in faraway places, crossing the sea, or starting a power company on the Columbia River, a steamship line in Bolivia.

  • World War II is the war that made our world. There's no question about that. The history of all the years in which I will spend my life, every single one, that is the seminal event of the history that we will experience.

    Source: americasfuture.org
  • I had a period in my life, maybe a decade or so, in which I was involved in that kind of thing, associating with the elite of various segments of society. It always made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn't wait to get out of there and change my clothes. The good part about that was getting home and changing into my regular clothes. Taking off the suit and the tie, taking off the tight shoes, and just relaxing. Being away from that stuff. It was stimulating, but I never liked it. I always felt it was a terrible, terrible burden.

    Source: americasfuture.org
  • Give the money directly to people who work hard. Instead of taking the money from the business and then filtering it through the horror of government programs, which is essentially giving it to social workers who live in Bethesda so they can drive their minivans and vote Democratic. Give them the money, so that they go and talk to the worker who is washing dishes, and they say, "Well, we want to help you, you see." And it would be better to help them by taking the money from that minivan-driving social worker and giving it directly to the guy who is really working hard by washing dishes.

    Source: americasfuture.org
  • I'm not afraid," Rafi said. "Why not?" "If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.

    Mark Helprin (2005). “A Soldier of the Great War”, p.197, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.

    Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.555, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.

  • 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 (1989). “Winter's Tale”, Pocket Books
  • Heavy blizzards start as a gentle and persistent snow.

    Mark Helprin (2005). “A Soldier of the Great War”, p.170, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

Page of
We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 2 quotes from the Novelist Mark Helprin, starting from June 28, 1947! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!