Mark Helprin Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Every sovereign country has the right to control its borders, and should. The idea that anyone would sneak over our borders without proper documentation to me is absolutely abhorrent.

  Mark Helprin

  Country, Ideas, Sovereign

  Source: americasfuture.org

  4 Copy quote

• It's very painful to be in debt. I'm the kind of person who would rather almost die than go into debt.

  Mark Helprin

  Debt, Kind, Painful

  Source: americasfuture.org

  4 Copy quote

• I had a period in my life, maybe a decade or so, in which I was involved in that kind of thing, associating with the elite of various segments of society. It always made me extremely uncomfortable. I couldn't wait to get out of there and change my clothes. The good part about that was getting home and changing into my regular clothes. Taking off the suit and the tie, taking off the tight shoes, and just relaxing. Being away from that stuff. It was stimulating, but I never liked it. I always felt it was a terrible, terrible burden.

  Mark Helprin

  Home, Shoes, Clothes

  Source: americasfuture.org

  4 Copy quote

• Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

  Mark Helprin

  Beautiful, Hands, Play

  Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.433, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• I follow my own nose. So I read things that are different. People will always say to me, "Have you read Robert S. Bosco's latest novel?" or "Have you read so and so's history of Peru, which is reviewed in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and has a buzz about it?" I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm like from another planet. I'm a pygmy from the jungle.

  Mark Helprin

  New York, Book, Talking

  Source: americasfuture.org

  4 Copy quote

• Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.

  Mark Helprin

  Way, Interpretation, Theory

  Source: americasfuture.org

  6 Copy quote

• Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

  Mark Helprin

  Stars, Dark, Light

  14 Copy quote

• Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.

  Mark Helprin

  Loss, Want Something, Balance

  Mark Helprin (2007). “Memoir from Antproof Case”, p.522, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• They're not just dreams. Not anymore, I dream more than I wake now, and, at times, I have crossed over. Can't you see? I've been there.

  Mark Helprin

  Dream, Just A Dream

  Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.208, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  6 Copy quote

• I have always thought limousines make me dreadfully uncomfortable, just the way that suits do. When I wear a suit, I feel like ants and termites are crawling all over my body. It's really, really uncomfortable. People put themselves in a kind of prison. It's like the world of the embassies.

  Mark Helprin

  People, World, Body

  Source: americasfuture.org

  7 Copy quote

• I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.

  Mark Helprin

  School, Criticism, Reason

  Source: americasfuture.org

  7 Copy quote

• ...I returned to walking up the mountain, and there, in the dim asexual beauty of reddening dawns and skies that firmed to blue, I discovered my real and appropriate strengths.

  Mark Helprin

  Strength, Nature, Real

  Mark Helprin (2007). “Memoir from Antproof Case”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• He felt as if he were paying for the privilege of music with portions of his life and body. But it was well worth it.

  Mark Helprin

  Body, Privilege, Wells

  Mark Helprin (2017). “Ellis Island and Other Stories”, p.14, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  7 Copy quote

• I have been fighting over commas all my life.

  Mark Helprin

  Fighting, Has Beens

  "Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto". Book by Mark Helprin, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 15, 2009.

  7 Copy quote

• She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.

  Mark Helprin

  Sleep, Years, Used

  Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.238, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• [When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...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.

  Mark Helprin

  Crazy, Real, Book

  4 Copy quote

• From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.

  Mark Helprin

  Song, Long, Political

  8 Copy quote

• One is attracted to beauty. Beauty is the coordination of things, in such a way, that it is what attracts you. It's almost self-defining.

  Mark Helprin

  Self, Way, Defining

  Source: americasfuture.org

  25 Copy quote

• When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion.

  Mark Helprin

  Energy, Matter, Proportion

  Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.508, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

• Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

  Mark Helprin

  Grace, Fiction, Pages

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  New York, Careers, People

  4 Copy quote

• I am religious by nature, I'm not a nihilist. I don't follow, I don't even know what the tenets of things like deconstructionism are, and all those schools that come up and their way of looking at things that people strive to incorporate into what they write. I don't even know what they are. Because I sense from a distance that I don't want to know. And therefore even if I had no politics, actual politics, my cultural point of view is hopelessly out of date with the modern literary sensibility. Which is nihilistic, and ironic, detached, cool, and cowardly.

  Mark Helprin

  Religious, Distance, Writing

  Source: americasfuture.org

  4 Copy quote

• Particularly as a Jew, I don't like missionary work. I've had it focused on me, and I don't like it. Let people be what they want to be.

  Mark Helprin

  People, Missionary, Want

  Source: americasfuture.org

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Helprin

  Editors, People, World

  16 Copy quote

• The best way to meet a woman is in an emergency situation - if you're in a shipwreck, or you find yourself behind enemy lines, or in a flood.

  Mark Helprin

  Rainy Day, Finding Yourself, Enemy

  11 Copy quote

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