Quotes from Mark Helprin

Everyone has a self-made pass for travel through the terror and sadness of the world, and because, in the end, nothing is sufficient, everyone wants to share his own method, hoping for strength in numbers.

The difference between classes of men is that the vast majority remember youth as their glory, and the tiniest fraction, in escaping a life of drudgery and increasing difficulty, finds something even better.

I'm a critic. I write essays about works of art. It's like being a eunuch in the seraglio, but unrequited love is the sweetest, and I have the proper distance. I can compress the qualities of beauty I've been trained to see, store them up, and bring them out at will, rapid-fire, in the combinations I want.

When I got back to Rome I discovered that the Italian army considered me dead—in Gruensee, in the observation post, and on the Cima Bianca. That I was reported killed three times seemed not to affect their trust in the reports except to strengthen it. Being the army, they must have thought that anyone who was killed three times was most certainly deader than if he had been killed only once.

You don't have to believe me. It's all right if you don't. The beauty of the 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." He

Nothing is born as strong as it can become.

Connoisseurs of paintings were curiously indifferent about color itself, and were seldom possessed by it. Rather, they possessed it. And they seemed to be easily seated. They were like the gourmets, who had to build castles of their food before they could eat it. They confused beauty and knowledge, passion and expertise.

Sometime love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing, and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure expectation against which failure and betrayal are contrasted like the dark shadows on a moonlit road.

The gravest, most persistent sin of mankind lies in not treating everyone as an individual. So, in short, I take Arabs as they come, just like everyone else.

people who lived in the mountains knew that all the truly great things had already been accomplished. They did not need to imagine ladders that would lead to heaven, or things of massive size that would astound the heart, because they had them in such profusion that it was difficult to get from town to town, and because of them the sun itself often was denied a chance to shine, or forced to break in gold through opaque ridges of ice and snow whiter than physics would allow.

I don't want an ambulance. I want you to sit down and shut up. But Signore, an ambulance could take you to a hospital. They could help you. I don't want to die in a hospital. You wouldn't! You'd live! Alessandro closed one eye. I don't want to be alive in a hospital, either.

Though it would take a long time for him to understand the principle, it was that to be paid for one's joy is to steal.

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 of 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.

Alessandro sat up straight. How is it you think babies are born? Something the mother and father do before sex, some sort of cloth or herb or hard-boiled egg that the father puts in the mother or something, with a rubber bulb and a glass dish. No, Alessandro said. That's not quite it. No? No. You just have to have sex—if you're married, fifty times; if you're not married, once. You're kidding!

Magnetyzm barw zmuszaÅ' go do kradzenia obrazów.

He was not sure to what he had to be loyal. But he assumed that this uncertainty, like the other torments suffered by his fellow lunatics, would someday vanish.

You can come back, his father had said. Why leave if I'll come back? Alessandro had asked, and then had quoted Horace. 'New skies the exile finds, but the heart is still the same.

Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes. Mum's the word. I suppose it's because his wife's dead, said Christiana, that he dances with a broom. I don't think so, said Boonya. He dances with a mop, too. Maybe he had a mistress. He did, but she had short hairs. I also got short-haired mops.

Isn't it better to think nothing than to think something that is completely idiotic?

She was exquisite, and he feared that he was blinded to everything else, that he was drawn to her by weakness, that his passion for her was incomplete. Know ing all too well the deeply religious love of the Italian poets for women they had merely seen on the street, he feared that his infatuation for Lia could never be compared to the elemental union that can occur between men and women when God is present and light surrounds them.

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. You don't have time, for example, to think about the city even as you are walking through it.

I didn't know God until I saw them. Its funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens.

Isn't Mr. Cecil Wooley the fattest, slittiest-eyed thing you've ever seen? And don't you suppose that being called Reverend Doctor Mootfowl is not a common phenomenon, and never has been?

No one knows better than I that it's all here, and need not be explained or interpreted—just seized.