Quotes from Mark Helprin

Potatoes have much more staying power than caviar.

Recollection could be more powerful and more perilous than experience itself.

Those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful.

People in my constituency are starving and born with sixteen fingers. Did you ever eat weasel shish-kebob? Freddy doesn't walk by the side of the motorways to gather dandelions for his salad, but the people who sent me here do. Why are we supporting him? He doesn't deserve it. The Tories won't give milk to children who go to school hungry and come home to baked cat.

It was easy to argue with Quagliagliarello, if you had patience, and if you could pronounce his name.

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.

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.

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.

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

The streets of New York and some wards of its venerable institutions were packed with people who, despite being entirely forsaken, had episodes of glory that made the career of Alexander the Great seem like a day in the life of a file clerk.

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.

He could not have loved Virginia Gamely more, and he wondered if what he assumed lay at such great distance were present in this very city -or even in Virginia herself, if the future were to be fair and imaginative enough to take refuge in a single soul.

When people love one another, conversation is not a necessity but a pleasure, and when they reach, as at times they do, deep into the immeasurable part of what holds them together, everything can pass between them without a word.

her parents had few friends, avoided social engagement, were awkward when they couldn't avoid it, and spent most of their time reading, playing music, doing punishing exercise, or, like crazy Zen monks, sitting for hours in the garden or on the terrace doing absolutely nothing.

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.

You're always condemned to die. It's just a matter of timing.

I can tell you only that beauty cannot be expressed or explained in a theory or an idea, that it moves by its own law, that it is God's way of comforting His broken children.

The room, as she saw it, was a web of motion, a symphony of mischievou dancing particles quite like the smooth and placid notes of a fine concerto.

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.

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.

What I did with his automobile was fairly dramatic and somewhat risky, but still a lot easier than finding a parking place on the Upper East Side.

strength floods in after a fall.

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.

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