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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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Mark Helprin
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: June 28
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
New York City
New York
Various
Criticism
Thought
Uninterested
School
Terribly
Reason
Compete
Always
Recently
Schools
Reasons

More quotes by Mark Helprin

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I have been fighting over commas all my life.
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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
Mark Helprin
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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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When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.
Mark Helprin
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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.
Mark Helprin