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book quote
book quote - Bilingual quotes that celebrate the beauty of language, showcasing meaningful expressions in two unique perspectives.
Mark Helprin
I've never touched a woman," Nicolò said, in deep despair. "You will. It'll take you years to learn what to do-not because it's a matter of technique, but precisely because it isn't. It's a matter of deep understanding, and of love. Nowadays, people have a problem with sex, I think. Popular culture is obsessed with it. It has become almost a sickness. It never was when I was a boy, and when I was in my prime.
Mark Helprin
I returned to the university only after the Second World War, and, even then, not having been in the resistance, I had political difficulties." "Why weren't you in the resistance?" "I was tired. And you have to have a certain temperament. You have to be fixed on the point. You need what politicians have, which is the absence of a sense of mortality. It comes, like a drug, from adoration and deference. Revolutionaries get it from dreams. They say that nothing is apolitical, that politics, the bedrock of life, is something from which you cannot depart. I say, fuck them.
Mark Helprin
No one knows better than I that it's all here, and need not be explained or interpreted-just seized.
Mark Helprin
Somewhat unnerved by what he felt were Germanic currents in a man whom he had taken to be just an Italian intellectual who ate flowers, Strassnitzky cautiously argued that the records are secret, part of the War Office. How do you expect to match the number with the man? I haven't the slightest idea, Alessandro said, almost arrogantly, but God is directly in charge of all things relating to life and death. That I've learned in the war. You think God is going to get you the operations records of the Austrian army? I don't know, but if He were, wouldn't you imagine that the first thing He'd do would be to have me conveyed to Vienna?
Mark Helprin
Real power is with those who are forever still, and I want to join them." "Good God. Why?" "Because I love them." "You mean like Hamlet jumping into the grave?" "Yes." "You can't do that!" Arturo screamed. "This is the twentieth century. And, besides, he jumped out." "He climbed out." "All right, he climbed out. Better that your soul should be on fire. It is on fire, and when you give it air it will flare like the sun. Even I ... My soul is on fire.... I, an accountant!
Mark Helprin
Humanity requires for its understanding and governance not science but art
Mark Helprin
No," De Roos said. "You mustn't thank me. The relatives of patients thank the physician as if the physician were God. It's no good, and if the patient dies it turns to ash-not just for them, but, as you can imagine, for me. I'll see you later.
Mark Helprin
Guariglia, 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? Perhaps it's then, when you have neither pride nor power, that you are saved, brought to an unimaginably great reward.
Mark Helprin
to cite Montaigne, "Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves."125
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
Quite clearly, Europe had come apart and millions had died not because of the shifting of great historical forces or the accidents of fate or destiny, the several bullets of Sarajevo, colonial competition, or anything else. It was because Orfeo had slipped from his seat in the office of the attorney Giuliani and been carried upon the flood, like a corked bottle full of shit, until he had lodged upon a platform at the Ministry of War, where his feverish hand and only half-innocent imagination had been directing the machinery of nations in homage to the exalted one and the holy blessed sap.
Mark Helprin
The smell of hot bread came from underneath the tent walls, and Perseus said that the ovens had just been opened. "You haven't eaten in three days. You'd better strengthen yourself." "How can I eat," Alessandro answered, pointing his nose to his padded hands. "Don't be ridiculous, they're perfect for holding a hot loaf of bread. You'll look like a kangaroo, but you'll be able to eat all you want. Now you can pick up a bowl of boiling soup as if you were a Cossack."
Mark Helprin
I knew even before I had desire that it would be gnarled and knotted, black and hard, a tree that would never bear fruit, a fish that would never jump, a cat that would never meow. All my life, bitterness and regret, bitterness, and regret. "And yet," he said, briefly closing his eyes, "I was able to imagine the softness and sweetness of love, for a time." He rested his head upon his right hand, in a gesture worthy of a classical actor, and everyone in the Teatro Barbarossa heard his breathing.
Mark Helprin
You see," the attorney Giuliani said, "not only is there no comfort in unanimity, but they cannot even achieve it." "I could unify them." "That's silly, Alessandro. If they supported you, or even listened, it would be because you flattened yourself and your ideas until everything that once was steep and noble was gone.
Mark Helprin
We have been so enthusiastic in our welcome as to be obsequious-to machines.
Mark Helprin
We will do what I always do in such situations, what I have already done a hundred times, which everyone who really knows the mountains does automatically. - Meaning? - catapult.
Mark Helprin
She was most fucked by how the city is moving. From the distance, all his moving elements seemed to be subject to one law, invisible to any of them separately. River ships were moved by a strong counterpoint, strong as magnetic force, it was felt as clearly as their figures saw. Their intricate courses were like invisible threads.
Mark Helprin
She was exquisite, and he feared that he was blinded to everything else, that he was drawn to her by weakness, that his passion for her was incomplete. Know ing all too well the deeply religious love of the Italian poets for women they had merely seen on the street, he feared that his infatuation for Lia could never be compared to the elemental union that can occur between men and women when God is present and light surrounds them.
Mark Helprin
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. Mum's the word." "I suppose it's because his wife's dead," said Christiana, "that he dances with a broom." "I don't think so," said Boonya. "He dances with a mop, too." "Maybe he had a mistress." "He did, but she had short hairs. I also got short-haired mops.
Mark Helprin
You can come back," his father had said. "Why leave if I'll come back?" Alessandro had asked, and then had quoted Horace. "'New skies the exile finds, but the heart is still the same.
Mark Helprin
The magnetism of colors forced him to steal images.
Mark Helprin
Papa," Alessandro said, his eyes closing. "She swims nude in the sea. She carries a pistol. And she wears perfume that makes me dizzy. Sometimes I go to the garden gate and smell the handle, because, when she touches it, the perfume stays.
Mark Helprin
The Parthenon is a pleasing building, and Mozart's Fifth Piano Concerto a pleasing work, because each makes use of proportions, relations, and variations that go beyond subjective preference, education, and culture into the realm of universal appeal conditioned by universal human requirements and constraints. A life lived with these understood, even if vaguely, will have the grace that a life lived unaware of them will lack.
Mark Helprin
Alessandro said, Most people don't do this, but it's what saves you. It tests you in the right way. Only for war, Rafi added. We'll almost certainly never have to go to war. It's unlikely that a war will break out in Europe, and even if it did it's less likely that Italy would be included, but I want to be prepared. And this is not just for war, you see, it's for everything.
Mark Helprin
Fear, delight, and being twenty were made for each other:
Mark Helprin
Though he was scared even to look up, much less down, he raised his hands and caught the side of the gondola. With a stream of curse words known principally to the fourth class of the Accademia San Pietro in Rome, he pulled himself back.
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
What's the difference what you watch?" Praeger shot back. "When that stream of hypnotic electrons starts winging into your brain, you're finished, good-as-gone, condemned to hell. No matter what it is, if you don't move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work.
Mark Helprin
Evidently, rigging cables is therapy for the Swiss: or part of their theology. What was it that he used to say? A balanced arc between mountain rows / as servant to his master shows / the power of besieged belief / in something something something, something something something-something to do with ducks, or rainbows.
Mark Helprin
Truth is not anchored to the ground by driven piles. It can float and take to the air; it is light and lovely and delicate. It is feminine as well as masculine. It is often gentle, and sometimes it can even make a fool of itself-but when it does it calls down God {who protects weak creatures}, and suddenly its foolishness becomes a blazing, piercing light.
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