Mark Helprin Quotes
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.
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.
She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years.
It's very painful to be in debt. I'm the kind of person who would rather almost die than go into debt.
Every sovereign country has the right to control its borders, and should. The idea that anyone would sneak over our borders without proper documentation to me is absolutely abhorrent.
It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.
There's an expression in Yiddish, which is "der gelernte naar" - a "learned fool." You can know a great deal, you can have a Ph.D., and you can still be a total idiot.
La guerre, la guerre, everything la guerre. That's how I grew up. So for me, it's real. It's not something in the past.
The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing form each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.
I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It's up to you. No you is educated who cannot educate himself.
I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn’t get him anything other than a living.
Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.
Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.
She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.
...what argument is left with someone you love if she is willing to break your heart?
We are like poor people, who have nothing but each other, and are happy.
In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.
I was brought up, ' Freddy informed him, 'not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all types.
At least until there are new lakes in the clouds that open upon living cities as yet unknown, and perhaps forever, that is a question which you must answer within your own heart.
