If it weren't for music, I would think that love is mortal.

— Mark Helprin

If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.

— Mark Helprin

In America, Frederick, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit.

— Mark Helprin

In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even at the famous sites, tourism is inconstant.

— Mark Helprin

I read. The more you read, the more the world opens up to you... and the happier you are and more comforted you feel. It's up to you. No you are educated who cannot educate himself.

— Mark Helprin

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

I see no justice in that plan."" Who said," lashed out Isaac Penn, "that you, a man, can always perceive justice? Who said that justice is what you imagine? Can you be sure that you know it when you see it, that you will live long enough to recognize the decisive thunder of its occurrence, that it can be manifest within a generation, within ten generations, within the entire span of human existence? What you are talking about is common sense, not justice. Justice is higher and not as easy to understand -- until it presents itself in unmistakable splendor. The design of which I speak is far above our understanding. But we can sometimes feel its presence." No choreographer, no architect, engineer, or painter could plan more thoroughly and subtly. Every action and every scene have its purpose. And the less power one has, the closer he is to the great waves that sweep through all things, patiently preparing them for the approach of a future signified not by simple human equity (a child could think of that), but by luminous and surprising connections that we have not imagined, by illustrations terrifying and benevolent -- a golden age that will show not what we wish, but some bare awkward truth upon which rests everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.

— Mark Helprin

I think it takes some terrible or great event to fuse two people together without inhibition. Without heat or shock, it can't be done. I believe that's why sexual love, which needn't be, is so intensely intertwined with sin.

— Mark Helprin

I've given myself to you. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats. And confounds it. Love, that's what it is. You've always made the mistake that men often make, and carried forward the great fault that Mars civilization, which is that you believe that your philosophy is deeper than love.

— Mark Helprin

I was brought up,' Freddy informed him, 'not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all types.

— Mark Helprin