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Winter's Tale QUOTES

Winter's Tale QUOTES

1 " 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 , Winter's Tale

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

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

3 " [When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

4 " 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. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

5 " 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. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

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

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

7 " Physical features count little unless they are illumined from within. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

8 " Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

9 " No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

10 " Adversity has its compensations, that in falling, and in failing, we rise. It is as if there is a hand behind us that sets to right all imbalances. Why do you think the saints seldom had the temporal power that we mistakenly identify with the fruits of justice? Do you think they needed it, or cared? "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

11 " their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

12 " Why do people resist [engines, bridges, and cities] so? They are symbols and products of the imagination, which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

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

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

14 " Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

15 " There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

16 " For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

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

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

18 " Justice can sleep for years and awaken when it is least expected. A miracle is nothing more than dormant justice from another time arriving to compensate those it has cruelly abandoned. Whoever knows this is willing to suffer, for he knows that nothing is in vain. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

19 " Justice came from a fight amid complexities, and required all the virtues in the world merely to be perceived. "

― Mark Helprin , Winter's Tale

20 " 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 , Winter's Tale