Quotes from Mark Helprin

Real power is with those who are forever still, and I want to join them. Good God. Why? Because I love them. You mean like Hamlet jumping into the grave? Yes. You can't do that! Arturo screamed. This is the twentieth century. And, besides, he jumped out. He climbed out. All right, he climbed out. Better that your soul should be on fire. It is on fire, and when you give it air it will flare like the sun. Even I ... My soul is on fire.... I, an accountant!

Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way.

Though he was scared even to look up, much less down, he raised his hands and caught the side of the gondola. With a stream of curse words known principally to the fourth class of the Accademia San Pietro in Rome, he pulled himself back.

Better to have a font of money in middle age than when you're young. Middle age is the time when you'll need it and appreciate it. I'll never appreciate it. I've been trained out of it. I don't want money. I want much more. I want what rarely happens. I want what people are afraid even to imagine. Like what? Resurrection, redemption, love.

Besides, he grew up in the city of the poor. You know as well as I do that in this country Marxism is a religious passion of the middle class.

For someone who is happy, celebration is yet another channel or instrument through which happiness may course. For someone who is not, celebration is a tedious parody of existence that seems pointless and false.

The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.

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.

If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.

Fear, delight, and being twenty were made for each other:

still, if it's hot enough I'll lie in the sun and feel at least three types of despair: despair that life is mostly gone and I've wasted it; despair that I cannot feel now what I thought I would if I saw all my struggles through; and despair that, because I don't know any other course to take, nothing will change.

Disdain is only as intense as similarity.

Alessandro said, Most people don't do this, but it's what saves you. It tests you in the right way. Only for war, Rafi added. We'll almost certainly never have to go to war. It's unlikely that a war will break out in Europe, and even if it did it's less likely that Italy would be included, but I want to be prepared. And this is not just for war, you see, it's for everything.

The Parthenon is a pleasing building, and Mozart's Fifth Piano Concerto a pleasing work, because each makes use of proportions, relations, and variations that go beyond subjective preference, education, and culture into the realm of universal appeal conditioned by universal human requirements and constraints. A life lived with these understood, even if vaguely, will have the grace that a life lived unaware of them will lack.

Fight the fever. Fight it, and, if necessary, go down fighting. The courage would not go unrewarded, would it? That is to be seen, she thought. But, meanwhile, there was no question – she would fight.

There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You'll know when you deserve these times. They come after you've been broken.

They will know failure and triumph intertwining, locked in a braid of life and death. But eventually they will sit in a quiet room and understand that the bright days and fiercely contested struggles have been solely for the purpose of bringing them to this poignant and tender silence.

As powerful a figure as this man was, still, he was more vulnerable than the slight little girl next to Alessandro. Even Alessandro knew, even at this moment, that the world had worn down the attorney Giuliani in ways that his son simply could not understand. The little ones, the delicate ones of nine or eleven, had all the strength, really.

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. The

to defeat pain he had to separate it from time, its most useful ally.

Papa, Alessandro said, his eyes closing. She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, when she touches it, the perfume stays.

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

Better a bird in hand than hell knows what in the bush.

the greater the stillness, the farther you could travel, until, in absolute immobility, you achieved absolute speed.