Mark Helprin Quotes

To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love.

We ate simply, we were healthy, and we were uninterested in those things that should be called possessions not because they are possessed but because they possess. Those ten years were the happiest of...

Zrobimy to, co zawsze robię w takich sytuacjach, co robiłem już sto razy, co automatycznie robi każdy, kto naprawdę zna góry. – To znaczy? – Katapultę.

An old man with a cane may discover that his many years have added nothing to his innocence but proof and explanation, and that, as much as he may have learned in his long life, he cannot see as far a...

What happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there’s nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how you try? Per...

. . you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason.

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.

All these things were shaken about within Peter Lake like pots and pans banging against the side of a peddler's swaybacked horse. It was hard to bear the weight of partial revelations which refused to...

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 b...

And how does God speak to you?In the language of everything that is beautiful.

And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.

And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke...

As he passed people rushing by the scores of thousands on the streets, he saw the glory of their faces. He saw in the way their eyes were set--in their reddened cheeks, and in their expressions of hop...

Because I don’t need oxygen. I’ve already come to all my conclusions. I’m just slowly gliding down. Someday I’ll be as light as a feather.

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.

Beverly had thought how strange and wonderful it would be if the earth were hurled far from its orbit, into the cold extremes of black space where the sun was a faint cool disc, not even a quarter-moo...

Breathing, for example, was never taken for granted, since, half the time, thanks to the many chemical works and refineries, it was nearly impossible.

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...

But you won’t abdicate.Of course not. It’s my duty to go on, to maintain the line. I can’t possibly fail in that. It’s as if you and I were throwing a ball back and forth to establish a record, and ha...

Do you know why you walk slowly when you’re old? No. Because with age you receive the gift of friction. The less time you have, the more you suffer, the more you feel, the more you observe, and the mo...