Mark Helprin Quotes

The poor fatherless baby of eight months is now the utterly broken-hearted and crushed widow of forty-two! My life as a happy one is ended! the world is gone for me! If I must live on (and I will do nothing to make me worse than I am), it is henceforth for our poor fatherless children - for my unhappy country, which has lost all in losing him - and in only doing what I know and feel he would wish.

My father died in my arms. That's tumult. That's everything exploding.

I don't mourn the dead. I mourn the living.

When the baby dies, On every side Rose stranger's voices, hard and harsh and loud. The baby was not wrapped in any shroud. The mother made no sound. Her head was bowed That men's eyes might not see Her misery.

Every day is a new sense of tearing my heart out of my body again when I see other children who have been killed, and I know what their families are going through.

Cancer has been a dark thread that has run throughout my life. It's taken my friends, my parents. My beautiful son.

Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.

It's kinda hard to be optimistic, When your homies lying dead on the pavement twisted.

Underneath me, Sam Grest - who'd been my friend and saved my life - lay perfectly still and slipped further and further into the final sleep of an unfair and horrible death.

For Beatrice, I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished.

I was slapped down to the ground when my son Wade died in 1996, in April of 1996.

Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.

If I told you the tragedy parts, we'd all sit here and cry.

My daughter, Grace, was not killed by a gun. She died suddenly at age 5 from a virulent form of strep. As I stood stunned in a church at her memorial, one of the hardest things I heard someone say was, 'I'm going to go home and hug my child a little tighter.' 'Well, good for you,' I thought. 'I'm going to go home and scream.'

There is nothing to be compared to this, 'cause we lost our brother, our hero. The world is mourning. We are mourning. The fans are mourning. It is unreal. Unbelievable.

Losing a child is probably the singular most horrible thing.

When Michael died I was tipped over the edge. I was beyond grief.

And my little sister died when she was 16.

I found my grandmother dead. It shook me up. I got up to make her breakfast, and I knew it was strange that she wasn't stirring. I went in to wake her, and she was laying in rigor mortis, and I'm done. I called next door, and the kid picked up the phone, and I was so wild, he dropped it.

I watched children dying. That will be the image that will stay with me.

Nobody likes a child to die or losing an election.

I have spent more than half a lifetime trying to express the tragic moment.

To me, death is dark, pain, grief.

I'm in a great rage now, as I understand how many lives we have lost.

A piece of each of us died.