Quote

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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Mark Helprin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 28
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Feel
Feels
Excruciating
Time
Arrived
Intensity
Mad
Sadness
Already
Joy

More quotes by Mark Helprin

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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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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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For what can be imagined more beautiful than the sight of a perfectly just city rejoicing in justice alone.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived.
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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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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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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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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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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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There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.
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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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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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Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.
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