Of course, everyone in the New World is an immigrant or a descendant of immigrants, and immigrants have built America and continue to do so. Legal or illegal, they are almost universally good people who work to better their lot and that of their children.

— Mark Helprin

Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within.

— Mark Helprin

Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardest thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.

— Mark Helprin

Read what you find interesting, and then follow your interests. You'll find that in doing so you always generate enough to illuminate the next step.

— Mark Helprin

Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. "It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof, and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that.

— Mark Helprin

Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.

— Mark Helprin

She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be.

— Mark Helprin

Small scenes can be so beautiful that they change a man forever.

— Mark Helprin

The arts community is generally dominated by liberals because if you are concerned mainly with painting or sculpture, you don't have time to study how the world works. And if you have no understanding of economics, strategy, history and politics, then naturally you would be a liberal.

— Mark Helprin

The beauty of truth is that it need not be proclaimed or believed. It skips from soul to soul, changing from each time it touches, but it is what it is, I have seen it, and someday you will, too.

— Mark Helprin