Top 140 Mark Helprin Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and carry the soul forever unmatched.”

— Mark Helprin

102. “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

103. “Because there were all kinds of hell – some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.”

— Mark Helprin

104. “Your time is a good time, and though I have to leave, you can stay. How lucky you are to be in the city just before it opens its eyes upon a golden age.”

— Mark Helprin

105. “Whatever I do I’ve always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.”

— Mark Helprin

106. “He wanted actually to live inside the dream that captured his eye, to spend his days and nights in a fume of burnished gold.”

— Mark Helprin

107. “Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.”

— Mark Helprin

108. “One shouldn’t ever do anything to protect one’s dignity. You either have it or you don’t.”

— Mark Helprin

109. “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

110. “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

111. “That’s writing, huh. What does it do?” “It’s like talking, but it makes no sound.”

— Mark Helprin

112. “Nothing is born as strong as it can become.”

— Mark Helprin

113. “Souls are complicated things.”

— Mark Helprin

114. “Marxists are people whose insides are torn up day after day because they want to rule the world and no one will even publish their letter to the editor.”

— Mark Helprin

115. “In the same way that certain sections of the city were mortal battlegrounds, some parts of the calendar were always more warlike than others, and during the days between Christmas and the new year all elements seemed to conspire to subdue the soul. Fire, rain, sickness, cold, and death were everywhere spread through the dark as in a painting of hell. People struggled until exhaustion, giving everything they had, and the days were packed with trials and mysteries.”

— Mark Helprin

116. “I’m sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can’t be literary.”

— Mark Helprin

117. “I’ve imagined great victories, and I’ve imagined great races. The races are better.”

— Mark Helprin

118. “Never will anyone know you better than he who has known you when everything you have has been stripped away.”

— Mark Helprin

119. “A young girl, a frailty, simple and true, who had been unable to stand up from the piano and had had to be carried; a girl half his age; a girl who could not shoot a gun, had never been in an oyster house, atop a tower, or under the wharves; a girl hotter always than noon in August; a girl who knew nothing; had thrown him so hard that he would be out of breath forever.”

— Mark Helprin

120. “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.”

— Mark Helprin

121. “The best thing in the world is the truth. You find it out anyway, in the end, or sooner.”

— Mark Helprin

122. “In the eyes of God, all things are interlinked; justice does indeed spring in great surprise from the acts and consequences of ages long forgotten; that love is not broken by time.”

— Mark Helprin

123. “When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion.”

— Mark Helprin

124. “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

125. “As I understand it, miracles come to those who risk defeat in seeking them. They come to those who have exhausted themselves completely in a struggle to accomplish the impossible.”

— Mark Helprin

126. “People like that continually expose their souls to mortal danger in imagining that they are free of it, when, indeed, the only mortal danger for the spirit is to remain too long without it. The world is made of fire.”

— Mark Helprin

127. “They move, don’t they? Who do you think sets things to moving? Nothing that moves lacks a soul.”

— Mark Helprin

128. “The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.”

— Mark Helprin

129. “One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you’ve learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning.”

— Mark Helprin

130. “All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddler’s swaybacked horse. It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to venture past the tip of his tongue.”

— Mark Helprin

131. “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.”

— Mark Helprin

132. “Only bad actors memorize lines. Good actors are perpetually writing them as they act.”

— Mark Helprin

133. “He was able to find the intensity and beauty that he wanted, in the plung itself. Physical forces in a complicated coalition of gravity, acceleration, and temperature were powerful and intense enough to satisfy him. It made sense. Nothing was as comforting as the enduring purity of elemental forces, and returning to them could not mean defeat. But he never thought that he would die in a bark suit, strapped to a shock pancake, next to an incompetent midget.”

— Mark Helprin

134. “When you’re alone you can long so hard for something like an embrace that you mine it from the air. You find it in meanings that you might not otherwise grasp, for which it is helpful to arise early in the morning, when the mind is clear and the heart is gentle.”

— Mark Helprin

135. “He heard the Baymen tell of war, but they never said it could be harnessed, its head held down, and made to run in place.”

— Mark Helprin

136. “Mortality is like the cold. It cannot be altered by human conceit or solidarity, and at the end you will be on your knees, in shock and amazement, and then you’ll have only one sword, one shield, one great thing to carry you through.” Alessandro waited to hear what that was, but his father would not say. “If you don’t discover it yourself, it will be nothing more than an exhortation from me.”

— Mark Helprin

137. “Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.”

— Mark Helprin

138. “The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work.”

— Mark Helprin

139. “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

140. “He wanted more than anything in the world to embrace her. But it seemed out of the question. Then she turned to him and stretched out her arms. And he went to her as if he had been born for it.”

— Mark Helprin

141. “What a place to put a city, right on the front line of absolute zero. No wonder a cow burned it down.”

— Mark Helprin

142. “Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.”

— Mark Helprin

143. “Life is so quick that it’s all played out at the gates of death, and the value of resolution is that it quickens life.”

— Mark Helprin

144. “You know,” said Al in a daze of hunger and cold, “when you see this, you realize that despite all the crap that goes on in the cities, despite all the words and accusations, the country has balance and momentum. The whole thing is symmetrical and beautiful; it works. The cities are like bulbs on a Christmas tree. They may bum, swell, and shatter, but the green stays green. Look at it,” he said, eyes fixed on the horizon, not unmoved by the motion of the train. “Look at it. It’s alive.”

— Mark Helprin

145. “Resurrection, he thought, comes not by plan or effort, and should the past ever come alive, it will be a great surprise, in which images and ritual memory will pale.”

— Mark Helprin

146. “You’re always condemned to die. It’s just a matter of timing.”

— Mark Helprin

147. “Don’t worry about things that you simply cannot know. Let them fall back and recede like the foam pushed aside by the flanks of a ship. Leave them behind and let your heart power on.”

— Mark Helprin

148. “Craig Binky decided that to salvage his position he would bear any burden and pay any price, and find out exactly what was going on. He had to redeem his honor. He decided to ask a computer. He.”

— Mark Helprin