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Author: Mark Helprin
Quotes of Author: Mark Helprin
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  1. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You'll know when you deserve these times. They come after you've been broken. I'm speaking of a helpless, tranquil state before the great excitement of dawn.
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  2. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    Civilians seldom understand that soldiers, once impressed into war, will forever take it for the ordinary state of the world, with all else illusion. The former soldier assumes that when time weakens the dream of civilian life and its supports pull away, he will revert to the one state that will always hold his heart. He dreams of war and remembers it in quiet times when he might otherwise devote himself to different things, and he is ruined for the peace. What he has seen is as powerful and mysterious as death itself, and yet he has not died, and he wonders why.
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  3. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    Your materialism will make you suffer terribly not only at the end but also on the way.
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  4. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    I've had a profession for a number of years, and it has mastered me. 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. You don't have time, for example, to think about the city even as you are walking through it."
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  5. Mark Helprin _ Winter's Tale

    They come down here for their own benefit. It's as clear as day that they love it. The great irony and perfect joke is that the wretches on the bottom of the barrel get these self-serving scum as champions. Some champions! They feed off the poor-first materially, and then in spirit. But they deserve each other in a way, because vice and stupidity were made to go together. "I know that, you see, because I was poor. But I rose like a rocket, and I know how the whole thing works. The ones who are always on your side, or so they think, are the ones who keep you down. Everything they do keeps you down. They'll forgive you for anything. Rob, rape, pillage, and kill, and they'll defend you to yourself. They understand all outrages, and all your failings and faults, too. Perfect! You can go on that way forever. What do they care? Excuse me: they do care. They want it that way.
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  6. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    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.
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  7. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    His existence is not a question of argument but of apprehension. Either you apprehend God, or you do not.
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  8. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    You don't do things by halves. If you love a woman, you love her entirely. You give everything. You don't spend your time in cafes; you don't make love to other women; you don't take her for granted. Do you understand?
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  9. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    You're always condemned to die. It's just a matter of timing.
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  10. Mark Helprin _ A Soldier of the Great War

    Don't worry about me, no matter what happens. We're nervous here, but not afraid. We have all looked into our souls, one way or another, and are content to die if need be. The only thing left to say is that I love you.
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  11. Mark Helprin _ In Sunlight and In Shadow

    Harry understood that those left behind-the failures and the deformed, the suffering and the dead-are not just equal in soul, but that they are we and we are they. Struggle as we may for distinction, soon enough we fail, and, without exception, follow.
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  12. Mark Helprin _ In Sunlight and In Shadow

    Souls," he said, "like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But when for infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. "For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extent to which they succeed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacrifice. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or a bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance." His expression hardened, and then softened a little. "But so what," he said, rising. Pointing to the fire, he added, "That's where I want to go, and I will, and there I'll find peace-but not yet.
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