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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.

Mark Helprin

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Mark Helprin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 28
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Perhaps
Changed
Forever
Read
Desperately
Thought
Stolen
Great
Moved
Work
Truly
Would
Fool

More quotes by 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.
Mark Helprin
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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.
Mark Helprin
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Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.
Mark Helprin
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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.
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
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That's what the left is always doing. They have an ideal, and they want people to conform to it. When people don't conform to it, they end up being beaten into the mold. And beaten sometimes hard enough so that if they don't fit, then they kill them. That's what happened in the Soviet Union and China.
Mark Helprin
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If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.
Mark Helprin
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For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.
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.
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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I have been fighting over commas all my life.
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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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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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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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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I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to be at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness.
Mark Helprin
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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.
Mark Helprin
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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
Mark Helprin
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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.
Mark Helprin
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When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
Mark Helprin