Mark Helprin Quotes

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.

I do love to capture beauty in this world. And photos can last the test of time.

The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.

Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed, at its aspect everyone may create romance at the will of his imagination, and at a glance have his soul invaded by the most profound memories, no efforts of memory, everything summed up in one moment. Complete art which sums up all the others and completes them.

All pasts are like poems; one can derive a thousand things, but not live in them.

I think making things beautiful is important. But often what's first considered ugly is beautiful, too.

The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful ... Love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.

Every form correctly seen is beautiful

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.

Elegance is not catching somebody's eyes, it's staying in somebody's memory

The first time I saw you, when you stepped into that Skiz ring against Kaede, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. I could've watched you forever. The first time I kiss you..." That memory overpowers me now, taking me by surprise. I remember every last detail of it, almost enough to push away the lingering images of the Elector pulling June to him. "Well, that might as well have been my first kiss ever.

Tis the perception of the beautiful, A fine extension of the faculties, Platonic, universal, wonderful, Drawn from the stars, and filtered through the skies, Without which life would be extremely dull

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

The dreams of childhood - it's airy fables, its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of the world beyond; so good to be believed in once, so good to be remembered when outgrown.

Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.

Venus de Milo. To a child she is ugly. When a mind adjusts to thinking of her as a completeness, even though, by physiologic standards, incomplete, she is beautiful.

A thing of beauty is a job forever.

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Art is - representing the beautiful. There must be Art in everything.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.

Writers remember everything...especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is the ability to remember the story of every scar. Art consists of the persistence of memory.