Quotes from Mark Helprin

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

Souls are complicated things.

The beauty of the truth is that it need not to 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.

His name was Peter Lake, and he said to himself out loud, "You're in bad shape when a horse takes pity on you, you stupid bastard

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.

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.

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

Because no windows were open and the air was so still and cold that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead.

Those events which have passed, and which are the foundations of our lives, must be somewhere, he thought. They must be recapturable, even if only in a perfect world. 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.

Whatever is, is, and whatever is not, is not

He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.

But each time he received an invitation from the Harvard Club to join…he postponed his application for the time when he could do little but rest in the kind of comfortable chair that is to the end of life what a cradle is to the beginning.

But in the end he was so tired and hungry that, rather than walk to Utah, he decided to take his chances in a moss-and-puffball suit on a shock pancake thrown into the air by a giant catapult. Besides, the thing was insanely alluring.

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.

Marriages are made in heaven which is why they cause so much trouble on earth.

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

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

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.

Harry looked at Margaret and thought that, should a woman grow old, she might still have her deepest charm. Should a woman grow old, she would still be a woman, the essence of being so being so inerasable as never to vanish. And if men were to understand this as they, too, grew old, the world would be a happier place.

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.

HERE AT THE GOLDEN GATE IS THE ETERNAL RAINBOW THAT HE CONCEIVED AND SET TO FORM. A PROMISE INDEED THAT THE RACE OF MAN SHALL ENDURE INTO THE AGES. Like

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.

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.

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?