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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.

Mark Helprin

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Mark Helprin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 28
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Humans
Floor
Victories
Life
Roll
String
Like
Perfection
Pearls
Victory
Rope
Break
Anarchy
Race
Breaks
Away
Narrow
Human
Strings
Intoxicated

More quotes by Mark Helprin

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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.
Mark Helprin
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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.
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Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.
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Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.
Mark Helprin
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I believe that Israel is very likely not to survive, it's not going to last forever, and now there's nothing that someone like me can do about it, in that it's a threat of nuclear or biological or chemical attack.
Mark Helprin
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It was a good speech, but the reaction was due to the fact that politics are madness, and even if one does not know it, a country in electoral season experiences flares of lunacy like the great storms that sometimes march across the golden surface of the sun.
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Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
Mark Helprin
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He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.
Mark Helprin
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They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.
Mark Helprin
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Perhaps things are most beautiful when they are not quite real when you look upon a scene as an outsider, and come to possess it in its entirety and forever when you live in the present with the lucidity and feeling of memory when, for want of connection, the world deepens and becomes art.
Mark Helprin
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I've always been terribly uninterested in criticism. And one of the reasons, I just thought recently, is that you know there are various schools of criticism that will compete, and one will supercede the other.
Mark Helprin
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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.
Mark Helprin
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Peter Lake had no illusions about mortality. He knew that it made everyone perfectly equal, and that the treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter, and love. The wealthy could not buy these things. On the contrary, they were for the taking.
Mark Helprin
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Words were all he knew they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment.
Mark Helprin
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[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...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.
Mark Helprin
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I have been fighting over commas all my life.
Mark Helprin
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When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
Mark Helprin
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One thing you will discover is that life is based less than you think on what you’ve learned and much more than you think on what you have inside you from the beginning. Memoir From Antproof Case
Mark Helprin
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The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
Mark Helprin
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To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.
Mark Helprin