Quotes from Mark Helprin

If all the months and all their days could be like June weather in New York, there would be paradise on earth. Often, in early June, momentous decisions are made, power waxes strong, quick wars are fought, and love affairs are begun and ended.

I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It's up to you. No you is educated who cannot educate himself.

This extraordinary young woman does not photograph like a model (so many of whom seem unalive, unpleasant, and stupid), because her beauty is not fixed but the result of what she is as she moves and speaks. The life within her is what makes him love her, and he thinks how lucky he is to have met her when both of them are so young.

A cat is an excuse for a lonely woman to talk to herself. That's what a cat is.

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.

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

When finally the sky grew ink-black, the trees were visible only as their swaying branches blotted out the stars that crossed in blazing showers, as sometimes they do. The language of the stars, seldom read and heeded less, told beautifully and in silence of all the victories that had ever been won and all the defeats ever suffered. In uncountable lines of light across the widest sphere, the stars spoke of everything notable even down to a leaf blowing rhythmically in the wind.

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.

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.

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.

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.

lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.

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.

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.

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.

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

Loyalty is the elixir that makes death easy, but it's also the quality that gives life purpose.

but, as we know, even when the silver wears away and you're left with copper, if you attend to it every day it has a gleam all its own.

to cite Montaigne, "Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves."125

Her eyes showed that though she may have decided to regret him, as long as he was in her presence she could not.

I don't know for sure, he said, but I can't imagine that God, who is so adept at linking parents with children, would so cruelly separate them. Perhaps it isn't anywhere near the truth. Perhaps I'm merely self-serving. I don't know, but I believe against all odds in exactly what you say. You don't care what anyone else thinks, do you? No, Papa. I never did. That can only be because you believe. Yes. And how does God speak to you? In the language of everything that is beautiful.

They were already in love and both of them knew it, but for both it was too fast.

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.

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