Mark Helprin Quotes - Page 4

What I really like to do is to sit quietly and write. All that other stuff is a problem. Publication to reception to negotiation to... everything, it's a problem. And I like to sit outside for long periods of time and just be in the tranquility of nature. That's what I like.

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.

Writing is still my main career, but I would love, for instance, to serve in the New York State Assembly.

People's position on immigration, once they get "sophisticated," and they rise to the higher levels of commentary or government, it's usually determined solely by economics. And not by anything else.

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.

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.

We should have absolute control over our borders. If we want cheap labor to depress wages and disempower the unions, then we could have guest workers. But we have to face that issue. What is it that we want to do? Rather than not facing it, and having porous borders, and the effect is that it disempowers the unions.

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.

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 And therefore even if I had no politics, actual politics, my cultural point of view is hopelessly out of date with the modern literary sensibility.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.

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.

As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.

Such a thing as the child left alone to die in the hallway was unknown on the marsh. But here, in the dawn, was mortality itself. In the city were places to fall from which one could never emerge -- dark dreams and slow death, the death of children, suffering without grace or redemption, ultimate and eternal loss. The memory of the child stayed with him. But that was not to be the end of it, for reality went around in a twisting ring. Even the irredeemable would be redeemed, and there was a balance for everything. There had to be.

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

Truth is no rounder than a horse's eye.

And they'll vote for me because I'm the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.

Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.

Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves.

All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.

The human race is intoxicated with narrow victories, for life is a string of them like pearls that hit the floor when the rope breaks, and roll away in perfection and anarchy.

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.

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.

their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals.

When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.

The horse could not do without Manhattan. It drew him like a magnet, like a vacuum, like oats, or a mare, or an open, never-ending, tree-lined road.

Why do you think great leaders and great orations are coincident with wars, revolutions, and the founding or ending of governments and states? Common interests then are so clear that speeches are effortlessly drawn, but at present neither the facts nor the consequences are sufficiently clear to make oratory legitimate. This is the kind of war that will wind on and make fools of its partisans and opponents both.