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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
Victory
Rope
Break
Anarchy
Race
Breaks
Away
Narrow
Human
Strings
Intoxicated
Humans
Floor
Victories
Life
Roll
String
Like
Perfection
Pearls

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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.
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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.
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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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When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
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World War II is the war that made our world. There's no question about that. The history of all the years in which I will spend my life, every single one, that is the seminal event of the history that we will experience.
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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.
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My father ran London Films. He made films like 'The Red Shoes,' 'The Third Man.' And he had had a long career in the film business, which was bifurcated with a career in intelligence. He had to deal with gangsters, and sometimes he would take me with him. Also, I went to school with their children.
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It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.
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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.
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I have been fighting over commas all my life.
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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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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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We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings.
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