In Sunlight and in Shadow Quotes

“Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“How far do you have to go before you forgive yourself for how you were born?”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“What could be more lovely than writing a book about something you love?”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“And then I went out to the ocean. Do you know what it was like? The waves broke, and each time they did, as they slapped against the sand, I could feel it all through my body. And each time they broke, and each time they thudded down, they said, you have only one life, you have only one life.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor close to being in love.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Watching the children, he noticed two things especially. A girl of about five, and her sister, who was no more than three, wanted to drink from the pebbled concrete fountain at the playground’s edge, but it was too high for either of them, so the five-year-old…jumped up and, resting her stomach on the edge and grasping the sides, began to drink. But she was neither strong enough nor oblivious enough of the pain to hand on, and she began to slip off backward. At this, the three-year-old…advanced to her sister and, also grasping the edge of the fountain, placed her forehead against her sister’s behind, straining to hold her in place, eyes closed, body trembling, curls spilling from her cap. Her sister drank for a long time, held in position by an act as fine as Harry had ever seen on the battlefields of Europe.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“It's a defining difference, curiosity. I've never known a stupid person who was curious, or a curious person who was stupid.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“There's something about rushing water that I can watch for hours and feel as if I need to do nothing more. It's alive in a way that's greater than any description of it...”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“But, Catherine, everything's that true despite us - the things they're talking about, natural laws - will always remain true despite us. What matters is what's true because of us. That's what's up for grabs. That's where the battle is. One remembers and values one's life not for its objective truths, but for the emotional truths...The only thing that's really true, that lasts, and makes life worthwhile is the truth that's fixed in the heart. That's what we live and die for. It comes in epiphanies, and it comes in love, and don't ever let frightened people turn you away from it.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“That is, " Harry said, " because the world has never seen - in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness - anything like the American fighting man. Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-German Viennese, the British, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Danish, or the Nepalese. You may in the future condemn us for it. You may continue to think that we are savage, disproportionate, and uncivilized. But we saved you the last time. And it is we, I guarantee you, will will liberate Paris and drive into Berlin. We don't like it. We don't like fighting and dying. But ... when it comes time for that, we are facile princeps, and will always be. We were born for it. The terrain of the New World educated us in it. That in America every man is a king assures us of it.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“If when she is aged you cannot see in the eyes of a woman the youth she was at eighteen, then it is not she that is old but you that are blind.”
― Mark Helprin, in Sunlight and in Shadow

“Souls are complicated things.”
― Mark Helprin, in Sunlight and in Shadow

“And if you were a spirit, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then there you would wait for someone to return, and the story to unfold.”
― Mark Helprin, in Sunlight and in Shadow

“I didn't know the world could be like this ... I've never seen the sky in such a passion of kindness.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Defiance, Catherine, is a gift of God, who is superior to nature. When nature comes to get you, honor God by treating it, as he would, with neither fear nor respect.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“They glanced over at Catherine, who was dancing with Billy, as only fathers and daughters can dance. No matter how old the daughter may be, the father is dancing, in joy unparalleled, with his child when she was little.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“I wanted the music to be full, to surround us, to lift us like the swell, so I rented a bloody orchestra. You only live once.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Marriages are made in heaven which is why they cause so much trouble on earth.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Humankind, or at least American-kind, will lose its edge as we produce more and more pipsqueaks and everyone gets nicer. Whole generations of pipsqueaks will be so fucking nice you won't be able to tell a man from a woman...And it will get worse and worse as people mistake nice for good. HItler was nice, supposedly, most of the time. A lot of good that did...”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Harry looked at Margaret and thought that, should a woman grow old, she might still have her deepest charm. Should a woman grow old, she would still be a woman, the essence of being so being so inerasable as never to vanish. And if men were to understand this as they, too, grew old, the world would be a happier place.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“You don't want to be content with yourself. People who are, are insufferable, the walking dead. But you don't want to be entirely driven, either, because then you just skate over the world and never touch it.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“but, as we know, even when the silver wears away and you’re left with copper, if you attend to it every day it has a gleam all its own.”
― Mark Helprin, in Sunlight and in Shadow

“They were already in love and both of them knew it, but for both it was too fast.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Her eyes showed that though she may have decided to regret him, as long as he was in her presence she could not.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“But each time he received an invitation from the Harvard Club to join…he postponed his application for the time when he could do little but rest in the kind of comfortable chair that is to the end of life what a cradle is to the beginning.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“Harry seemed to him to be a harmless jerk, and he himself was an idiot, although he was the last one to know, and what had happened, just like everything else, sailed through his mind like a dime dropping through a subway grate.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“The balance, restraint, and fairness of the English; their heartbreak and trials like a knife cutting at the city as it was turned on the lathe of time.”
― Mark Helprin, In Sunlight and in Shadow

“lebensraum.”
― Mark Helprin, in Sunlight and in Shadow