Top 140 Mark Helprin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “If it weren’t for music, I would think that love is mortal.”

— Mark Helprin

3. “The treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter and love.”

— Mark Helprin

4. “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

5. “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

6. “I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God’s way of comforting His broken children.”

— Mark Helprin

7. “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

8. “Anticipation is the heart of wisdom. If you are going to cross a desert, you anticipate that you will be thirsty, and you take water.”

— Mark Helprin

9. “A good river is nature’s life work in song.”

— Mark Helprin

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “In daily life language is important, if not in itself, then as a symptom.”

— Mark Helprin

14. “Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real; when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever; when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory; when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.”

— Mark Helprin

15. “Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.”

— Mark Helprin

16. “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

17. “To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.”

— Mark Helprin

18. “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

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

— Mark Helprin

20. “No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.”

— Mark Helprin

21. “Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You’ll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.”

— Mark Helprin

22. “Just the two of us. We’re in it together. The pleasure will be ours alone. For the rest of our lives.”

— Mark Helprin

23. “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

24. “Truth is no rounder than a horse’s eye.”

— Mark Helprin

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

— Mark Helprin

26. “Many people just like to show that they’re thinking the right thoughts. And as the ‘right’ thoughts change like the wind, so do they.”

— Mark Helprin

27. “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

28. “Well-timed silence is the most commanding expression.”

— Mark Helprin

29. “The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no question that he was capable of such a thing. She could see it in his face and read it in his every expression.”

— Mark Helprin

30. “If people love you for your soul, your face doesn’t matter and you don’t have to be perfect.”

— Mark Helprin

31. “I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It’s up to you. No you is educated who cannot educate himself.”

— Mark Helprin

32. “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

33. “I have seen lonely people of advancing age, yet as constant as angels, keeping faith to those they loved who fell in wars that current generations, not having known them, cannot even forget. The sight of them moving hesitantly among the tablets and crosses is enough to break your heart.”

— Mark Helprin

34. “Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the ‘Soave sia il vento’ and ‘Kentucky Woman.’ We have different words for ‘art’ and ‘idea’ because they are two different things.”

— Mark Helprin

35. “If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind.”

— Mark Helprin

36. “I have been fighting over commas all my life.”

— Mark Helprin

37. “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

38. “Adversity has its compensations, that in falling, and in failing, we rise. It is as if there is a hand behind us that sets to right all imbalances. Why do you think the saints seldom had the temporal power that we mistakenly identify with the fruits of justice? Do you think they needed it, or cared?”

— Mark Helprin

39. “As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.”

— Mark Helprin

40. “And then he was suddenly overwhelmed. It was as if a thousand bolts of lightning had converged to lift him. All he could see was blue, electric blue, wet shining warm blue, blue to no end, everywhere, blue that glowed and made him cry out, blue, blue, her eyes were blue.”

— Mark Helprin

41. “The abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours of sparkling winter nights, and, unattended, she took them in like lovers.”

— Mark Helprin

42. “And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city’s hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time.”

— Mark Helprin

43. “Very old age is when the things that go wrong cause other things to go wrong, until, like sparks racing up a fuse, they finally reach a pack of dynamite.”

— Mark Helprin

44. “From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.”

— Mark Helprin

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

— Mark Helprin

46. “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

47. “A profession is like a great snake that wraps itself around you. Once you are enwrapped, you are in a slow fight for the rest of your life, and the lightness of youth leaves you.”

— Mark Helprin

48. “The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation – if you’re in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.”

— Mark Helprin

49. “I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can’t even remain in the same room with coffee.”

— Mark Helprin

50. “I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I can’t imagine that God, who is so adept at linking parents with children, would so cruelly separate them. Perhaps it isn’t anywhere near the truth. Perhaps I’m merely self-serving. I don’t know, but I believe against all odds in exactly what you say.” “You don’t care what anyone else thinks, do you?” “No, Papa. I never did.” “That can only be because you believe.” “Yes.” “And how does God speak to you?” “In the language of everything that is beautiful.”

— Mark Helprin