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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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Mark Helprin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 28
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Like
Kicks
Devastate
Finished
Mule
Filled
Mules
Books
Remake
Read
Remakes
Soul
Shelf
Book
Shelves
Hard
Kick

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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.
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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
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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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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.
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If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.
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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.
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There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
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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
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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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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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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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Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
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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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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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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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No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile.
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Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss, to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right.
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For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.
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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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