My father ran London Films. He made films like ‘The Red Shoes,’ ‘The Third Man.’ And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.

— Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin Quotes

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.

— Mark Helprin

Critics can neither build nor explore. All they do, really, is say yes or no – and complicate it.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

Souls are complicated things.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and carry the soul forever unmatched.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

Life is so quick that it’s all played out at the gates of death, and the value of resolution is that it quickens life.

— Mark Helprin

The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don’t have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.

— Mark Helprin

I’ve given myself to you. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats. and confounds it. Love, that’s what it is. You’ve always made the mistake that men often make, and carried forward the great fault that mars civilisation, which is that you believe that your philosophy is deeper than love.

— Mark Helprin

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

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

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.

— Mark Helprin

One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you’ve learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning.

— Mark Helprin

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

— Mark Helprin
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