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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
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.
Mark Helprin
Isn't Mr. Cecil Wooley the fattest, slittiest-eyed thing you've ever seen? And don't you suppose that being called Reverend Doctor Mootfowl is not a common phenomenon, and never has been?
Eugene Wells
It's the devil's nectar. It's filthy and unhealthy. -Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case, referring to coffee {1995}
Mark Helprin
people who lived in the mountains knew that all the truly great things had already been accomplished. They did not need to imagine ladders that would lead to heaven, or things of massive size that would astound the heart, because they had them in such profusion that it was difficult to get from town to town, and because of them the sun itself often was denied a chance to shine, or forced to break in gold through opaque ridges of ice and snow whiter than physics would allow.
Mark Helprin
Better a bird in hand than hell knows what in the bush.
Mark Helprin
As powerful a figure as this man was, still, he was more vulnerable than the slight little girl next to Alessandro. Even Alessandro knew, even at this moment, that the world had worn down the attorney Giuliani in ways that his son simply could not understand. The little ones, the delicate ones of nine or eleven, had all the strength, really.
Mark Helprin
win. Spit in their eye, Evelyn had said, cheerfully but with the tranquil acceptance of her own fate. Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as He would, with neither fear nor respect.
Mark Helprin
I think it would be vain to imagine that we could be favored without effort. As I understand it, miracles come to those who risk defeat in seeking them. They come to those who have exhausted themselves completely in a struggle to accomplish the impossible.
Mark Helprin
but, as we know, even when the silver wears away and you're left with copper, if you attend to it every day it has a gleam all its own.
Mark Helprin
Several fireboat men were trying to board the burning ferry. They had no apparent reason to do so, for all the passengers were either dead or saved and the firemen could not hope to extinguish the flames simply by being closer to them. Why then were they working their way hand over hand on an alternately slack and taut rope that had started to burn, and dipped them now and then into the freezing river as the crowd took in its breath all at once? Peter Lake knew. They took power from the fire. The closer they fought it, the stronger they became. The firemen knew that though it sometimes killed them, the fire gave them priceless gifts.
Mark Helprin
They always say about the soldier that he's detached. That's true, for he's been in the eye of the storm, his heart has been broken, and he doesn't even know it.
Mark Helprin
These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds.
Mark Helprin
The eighth and ninth floors housed the library. It had several million volumes in open stacks, all the major newspapers and periodicals either bound or on computer, and a map section. Expert librarians maneuvered a seemingly limitless budget to keep it well maintained and up-to-date. The reference collections were wonders of the world.
Mark Helprin
Its funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens.
Mark Helprin
Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now
Mark Helprin
Peter Lake spurred the horse again, and extended his right arm like a lance, pointing it at the motionless officer. As they went by in a blur of white, he lifted the man's cap from his head, saying, "Allow me to take your hat." The enraged policeman pivoted, took out his notebook, and furiously wrote a description of the horse's buttocks.
Mark Helprin
Off Castle Garden, a mile to the southeast, near the western edge of Governors Island, a ship lay resting through a foggy spring night before the long and arduous trip back to the old world-whether Riga, Naples, or Constantinople is not certain.
Mark Helprin
Though it would take a long time for him to understand the principle, it was that to be paid for one's joy is to steal.
Mark Helprin
Connoisseurs of paintings were curiously indifferent about color itself, and were seldom possessed by it. Rather, they possessed it. And they seemed to be easily seated. They were like the gourmets, who had to build castles of their food before they could eat it. They confused beauty and knowledge, passion and expertise.
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