Top 140 Mark Helprin Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When you’re in what seems like an impossible situation and it looks sure that you’re going to be overrun, you have to keep in mind that only half of what the enemy does is actually going to put him in a position to overrun you. The other half is to communicate this so you’ll do his work for him.”

— Mark Helprin

52. “She was not quite as arresting in photographs as she was in the flesh, for her beauty was sprung directly from her soul, and proved that physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.”

— Mark Helprin

53. “Heavy blizzards start as a gentle and persistent snow.”

— Mark Helprin

54. “Critics can neither build nor explore. All they do, really, is say yes or no – and complicate it.”

— Mark Helprin

55. “For me, beauty is a hint, a flash, a glimpse of the divine and a promise that the world is good.”

— Mark Helprin

56. “Potatoes have much more staying power than caviar.”

— Mark Helprin

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

— Mark Helprin

58. “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

59. “I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.”

— Mark Helprin

60. “I think of myself as more of a 12th-Century artist than a modern one – I write, not for my own pleasure or the pleasure of my audience, but to praise God.”

— Mark Helprin

61. “The room, as she saw it, was a web of motion, a symphony of mischievou dancing particles quite like the smooth and placid notes of a fine concerto.”

— Mark Helprin

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “I wish that, like you, I could have spent my life transported aloft, as it were, every day, in music. Instead, I’ve lived like a caffeinated parrot.”

— Mark Helprin

66. “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.”

— Mark Helprin

67. “My father ran London Films. He made films like ‘The Red Shoes,’ ‘The Third Man.’ And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.”

— Mark Helprin

68. “It was easy to argue with Quagliagliarello, if you had patience, and if you could pronounce his name.”

— Mark Helprin

69. “He could not have loved Virginia Gamely more, and he wondered if what he assumed lay at such great distance were present in this very city -or even in Virginia herself, if the future were to be fair and imaginative enough to take refuge in a single soul.”

— Mark Helprin

70. “Columba, Lepus, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Orion, Taurus, Aldebaran, Gemini, Pollux, Castor, Auriga, Capella, the Pleiades, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Polaris, Draco, Cepheus, Vega, the Northern Cross, Cygnus, Deneb, Delphinus, Andromeda, Triangulum, Aries, Cetus, Pisces, Aquarius, Pegasus, Fomalhaut.”

— Mark Helprin

71. “If you don’t have compassion you won’t be compelled to help.”

— Mark Helprin

72. “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

73. “And I love you.′ she said her heart buoyant. She really did love him, although each time she said it and he could not reply, she loved him perhaps a little less.”

— Mark Helprin

74. “I’ve given myself to you. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats. and confounds it. Love, that’s what it is. You’ve always made the mistake that men often make, and carried forward the great fault that mars civilisation, which is that you believe that your philosophy is deeper than love.”

— Mark Helprin

75. “He thought only of one thing – the geometries before him. Here was God speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and silken dance.”

— Mark Helprin

76. “Remember, what we are trying to do in this life is to shatter time and bring back the dead. Rise, Virginia. Rise and see the whole world.” Virginia.”

— Mark Helprin

77. “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

78. “He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.”

— Mark Helprin

79. “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

80. “When soldiers go home, their first desire, whether they know it or not, is to have children, children being the only antidote for war.”

— Mark Helprin

81. “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

82. “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.”

— Mark Helprin

83. “How just it would be if for our final reward we were to be made the masters of time, and if those we love could come alive again not just in memory, but in truth.”

— Mark Helprin

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

— Mark Helprin

85. “You don’t want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don’t want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never touch it.”

— Mark Helprin

86. “I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I’m grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion.”

— Mark Helprin

87. “Then occurred a rare thing about which men and women sometimes dream. They carried on a full conversation in complete silence, discerning feelings, plans, exclamations, jokes, opinions, laughter, and dreams- rapidly, silently, inexplicably.”

— Mark Helprin

88. “When people love one another, conversation is not a necessity but a pleasure, and when they reach, as at times they do, deep into the immeasurable part of what holds them together, everything can pass between them without a word.”

— Mark Helprin

89. “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. I didn’t bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn’t teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong.”

— Mark Helprin

90. “But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn’t know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look.”

— Mark Helprin

91. “For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse.”

— Mark Helprin

92. “Harry understood that those left behind – the failures and the deformed, the suffering and the dead – are not just equal in soul, but that they are we and we are they. Struggle as we may for distinction, soon enough we fail, and, without exception, follow.”

— Mark Helprin

93. “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

94. “It was easy to be clever, but hard to look into the face of God, who is found not so much by cleverness as by stillness.”

— Mark Helprin

95. “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

96. “People in my constituency are starving and born with sixteen fingers. Did you ever eat weasel shish-kebob? Freddy doesn’t walk by the side of the motorways to gather dandelions for his salad, but the people who sent me here do. Why are we supporting him? He doesn’t deserve it. The Tories won’t give milk to children who go to school hungry and come home to baked cat.”

— Mark Helprin

97. “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.”

— Mark Helprin

98. “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.”

— Mark Helprin

99. “In living, one muddles through the years for the sake of those one or two moments which are indisputably great.”

— Mark Helprin

100. “Recollection could be more powerful and more perilous than experience itself.”

— Mark Helprin