Paris in the Present Tense Quotes

“The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and carry the soul forever unmatched.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved -- like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don't strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it will prevent it from entering the emotions. That's the kind of advice you can't do anything with except perhaps later, when you don't even know you're doing it. It's part of the freeze of counterpoint.'
'I've never heard that expression,' she said.
'Stasis may be a better word -- the liberation of the space between two contradictions. Let me explain if I can. If two waves of equal but opposite amplitude meet in water, what do you get'
'Flat water.'
'In sound?'
'Silence.'
'Right. From agitation, peace, a perfection that you might have thought unobtainable from the clash of contradictory elements.'
'I think you've explained the magic of counterpoint very well.'
'Not really. It's inexplicable. I've noted it, that's all. Half of humanity's troubles arise from the inability to see that contradictory propositions can be valid simultaneously.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“If people love you for your soul, your face doesn’t matter and you don’t have to be perfect.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“. Loyalty is the elixir that makes death easy, but it’s also the quality that gives life purpose.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“and she knew that, tenure or not, she might not last long, perhaps not even until retirement, although having seen the quiet desperation of professors emeritus she wanted to work until she dropped. How could she communicate the reality of war and its effects – her field was twentieth-century France – without upsetting some Alice-in-Wonderland student who, having experienced nothing and been hypnotized into victimhood, would demand a trigger warning? It was a madhouse, made even more difficult for her in navigating the shoals of what was her second language after French, the third being a childhood Arabic fortified by some later study. To her astonishment, she was forbidden to describe atrocities against white people or men. At first she thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t, and she quickly came to the realization that such a regime was merely a mechanism to give power to one or another struggling political faction in the highly infected, incestuous bloodstream of the university”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“This extraordinary young woman does not photograph like a model (so many of whom seem unalive, unpleasant, and stupid), because her beauty is not fixed but the result of what she is as she moves and speaks. The life within her is what makes him love her, and he thinks how lucky he is to have met her when both of them are so young.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“For me, beauty is a hint, a flash, a glimpse of the divine and a promise that the world is good.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no question that he was capable of such a thing. She could see it in his face and read it in his every expression.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“Very old age is when the things that go wrong cause other things to go wrong, until, like sparks racing up a fuse, they finally reach a pack of dynamite.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“I wish that, like you, I could have spent my life transported aloft, as it were, every day, in music. Instead, I've lived like a caffeinated parrot.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“her parents had few friends, avoided social engagement, were awkward when they couldn’t avoid it, and spent most of their time reading, playing music, doing punishing exercise, or, like crazy Zen monks, sitting for hours in the garden or on the terrace doing absolutely nothing.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“We're not dealing with Isaac Newton here. She likes what she calls 'romance.' To her that means candles, rose petals, and a bathtub. I don't understand what this thing is that women have about candles. All I can say is that there must've been a hell of a lot of sex in the eighteenth century.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“upwelled”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“The gravest, most persistent sin of mankind lies in not treating everyone as an individual. So, in short, I take Arabs as they come, just like everyone else.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense

“still, if it’s hot enough I’ll lie in the sun and feel at least three types of despair: despair that life is mostly gone and I’ve wasted it; despair that I cannot feel now what I thought I would if I saw all my struggles through; and despair that, because I don’t know any other course to take, nothing will change.”
― Mark Helprin, Paris in the Present Tense