263 Quotes by Mark Helprin

Just the two of us. We’re in it together. The pleasure will be ours alone. For the rest of our lives.

Souls are complicated things.

I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. I can’t even remain in the same room with coffee.

If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind.

But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn’t know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look.

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.

Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the ‘Soave sia il vento’ and ‘Kentucky Woman.’ We have different words for ‘art’ and ‘idea’ because they are two different things.

For a gift that does not find balance and a service that is not returned are worth less than a curse.

In the same way that certain sections of the city were mortal battlegrounds, some parts of the calendar were always more warlike than others, and during the days between Christmas and the new year all elements seemed to conspire to subdue the soul. Fire, rain, sickness, cold, and death were everywhere spread through the dark as in a painting of hell. People struggled until exhaustion, giving everything they had, and the days were packed with trials and mysteries.