Mark Helprin Quotes

The treasures of the earth were movement, courage, laughter and love.

I love to watch the movement of light on water, and I love to play in rivers and lakes, swimming or canoeing. I am fascinated by people who work with water - fishermen, boatmen - and by a way of life that is dominated by water.

Whatever hardships there have been in my life I still live in a very privileged position. Fear is not knowing where your next meal is coming from. Fear is seeing a child get hurt. Fear is watching someone you love waste away. Fear is knowing you are going to die yourself. But there's no fear in what I do. I write books.

As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

They lived and laughed and loved and left.

Death does not discriminate; whether saints or sinners, in the end, all are equal.

Who's a prince or beggar in the grave?

There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time.

There are dreadful moments when death comes very near those we love, even if for the time being it passes by. But life is a great adventure, and the worst of all fears is the fear of living.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

Riches cannot rescue from the grave, which claims alike the monarch and the slave.

Death is the great leveller.

Joys do not fall to the rich alone; nor has he lived ill of whose birth and death no one took note.

The grave is, I suspect, the sole commonwealth which attains that dead flat of social equality that life in its every principle so heartily abhors.

Six feet of dirt make all men equal.

The best things in life are free. And it is important never to lose sight of that. So look around you. Wherever you see friendship, loyalty, laughter, and love...there is your treasure.

Life is fighting. In life, it's the look ahead that counts. We are all born equally far from the sun. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love.

Love like Death,, Levels all ranks, and lays the shepherd's crook Beside the scepter

I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.

Life deserves laughter, hence people laugh at it.

When we come to the last moment of this lifetime and we look back across it, the only thing that's going to matter is 'What is the quality of our love?'

If it is necessary to die in order to live like men, what harm in dying?

Without courage, honor, compassion, pity, love and sacrifice, as William Faulkner pointed out, we know not of love, but lust. We debase our audience. But we can ennoble and enrich our viewers and ourselves in our journey through this good time, this precious time, this great and wonderful experience we call life.

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.