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5f56c56
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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.
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Mark Helprin |
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994961b
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Do you know why you walk slowly when you're old?" "No." "Because with age you receive the gift of friction. The less time you have, the more you suffer, the more you feel, the more you observe, and the more slowly time moves even as it races ahead." "I don't understand." "You will."
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Mark Helprin |
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97a7c07
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The world goes this way and that. Ideas are in fashion or not, and those who should prevail are often defeated. But it doesn't matter. The virtues remain uncorrupted and uncorruptible. They are rewards in themselves, the bulwarks with which we can protect our vision of beauty, and the strengths by which we may stand, unperturbed, in the storm that comes when seeking God.
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Mark Helprin |
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b58c1f3
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If your faith is genuine, then you meet your responsibilities, fulfill your obligations, and wait until you are found. It will come. If not to you, then to your children, and if not to them, then to their children.
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responsibility
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Mark Helprin |
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805610e
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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.
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Mark Helprin |
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178e648
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Off Castle Garden, a mile to the southeast, near the western edge of Governors Island, a ship lay resting through a foggy spring night before the long and arduous trip back to the old world--whether Riga, Naples, or Constantinople is not certain.
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Mark Helprin |
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545c1a4
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Peter Lake spurred the horse again, and extended his right arm like a lance, pointing it at the motionless officer. As they went by in a blur of white, he lifted the man's cap from his head, saying, "Allow me to take your hat." The enraged policeman pivoted, took out his notebook, and furiously wrote a description of the horse's buttocks."
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Mark Helprin |
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16055ad
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Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given -so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The..
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Mark Helprin |
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eee1d2f
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By this time, no matter how hard he tried to understand, Nicolo's eyes had begun to glaze, but Alessandro had no fear of bending green cane, because he knew it seldom broke. "Remember this, then--even if"
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Mark Helprin |
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0e1a46f
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I have three hooves in the pasture and one already in the grave, but I have a few things more to tell before I get to the smoke and thunder.
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Mark Helprin |
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e31bfb4
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For the next hour or two, keeping up with Alessandro would be a task that would set the boy to breathing hard and make him think that something might be wrong with his heart, because he found it difficult to stay even with an old man who carried a cane and whose every step was a cross between an uncontrolled pivot and a barely arrested fall.
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Mark Helprin |
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74684f9
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Craig Binky decided that to salvage his position he would bear any burden and pay any price, and find out exactly what was going on. He had to redeem his honor. He decided to ask a computer. He
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Mark Helprin |
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d37f9bb
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I was brought up,' Freddy informed him, 'not to suffer anxiety about decisive initiative of all types.
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decisions
initiative
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Mark Helprin |
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3698ebd
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The first was that it was almost impossible to get. The second, that, once you had it, it was almost impossible to keep. The third, that these laws applied only to each individual but not to anyone else. In other words, though money was impossible to get and impossible to keep, for everyone else it flowed in by the bucketful and stayed forever.
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Mark Helprin |
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605ab1f
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Albany sometimes tried to rattle, but failed to emit an audible sound.
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Mark Helprin |
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a0b65b0
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Columba, Lepus, Canis Major, Canis Minor, Procyon, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Orion, Taurus, Aldebaran, Gemini, Pollux, Castor, Auriga, Capella, the Pleiades, Perseus, Cassiopeia, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Polaris, Draco, Cepheus, Vega, the Northern Cross, Cygnus, Deneb, Delphinus, Andromeda, Triangulum, Aries, Cetus, Pisces, Aquarius, Pegasus, Fomalhaut.
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Mark Helprin |
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840e6e4
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Besides, he grew up in the city of the poor. You know as well as I do that in this country Marxism is a religious passion of the middle class.
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Mark Helprin |
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bbae94b
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I knew it was easier to drill things in than to take them out.' 'It's like a screw!' Craig-Vyvyan shouted.... 'If you pull off it's head, you never get it out.
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hurtful-words
unkind-words
unkindness
verbal-abuse
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Mark Helprin |
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e052f20
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Disdain is only as intense as similarity.
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rivalry
similarities
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Mark Helprin |
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3f24756
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And he was seldom out of sight of the new bridges, which had married beautiful womanly Brooklyn to her rich uncle, Manhattan; had put the city's hand out to the country; and were the end of the past because they spanned not only distance and deep water but dreams and time. The
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Mark Helprin |
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cd511cd
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I've given myself to you. You may have my body, soul, everything. Time passes, and all I want is the intimacy that slows, defeats. and confounds it. Love, that's what it is. You've always made the mistake that men often make, and carried forward the great fault that mars civilisation, which is that you believe that your philosophy is deeper than love.
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intimacy
love
men-and-women-quote
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Mark Helprin |
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a1e37d1
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the greater the stillness, the farther you could travel, until, in absolute immobility, you achieved absolute speed.
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Mark Helprin |
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8e41620
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You don't have to believe me. It's all right if you don't. The beauty of the 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." He"
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Mark Helprin |
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d185612
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Connoisseurs of paintings were curiously indifferent about color itself, and were seldom possessed by it. Rather, they possessed it. And they seemed to be easily seated. They were like the gourmets, who had to build castles of their food before they could eat it. They confused beauty and knowledge, passion and expertise.
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Mark Helprin |
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f9bd32c
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Though it would take a long time for him to understand the principle, it was that to be paid for one's joy is to steal.
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Mark Helprin |
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b98260e
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Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given-so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The ..
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Mark Helprin |
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ec9edcf
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If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given--so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, howe..
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Mark Helprin |
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1cfd252
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Many times, his father had taken him to read them, insisting that they were the most important things he could have, and implying with a sharp dismissive gesture of hand and arm that wealth, fame, and worldly possessions were worthless and demeaning. "Little men," he once said, "spend their days in pursuit of such things. I know from experience that at the moment of their deaths they see their lives shattered before them like glass. I've se..
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Mark Helprin |
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bd2d21c
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For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, liripoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad..
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Mark Helprin |
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84ec2cd
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Isn't it better to think nothing than to think something that is completely idiotic?
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Mark Helprin |
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6089cbd
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She felt as if she knew the stars, and had been among them, or would be. Why was it that in planetarium lectures the telescopic photographs flashed upon the interior of the dome were so familiar--not just to her, but to everyone. Farmers and children, and, once, Paumanuk Indians pausing in their sad race to extinction, had all understood the sharp abstract images, immediately and from the heart. The nebulae, the sweep of galaxies, the centr..
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Mark Helprin |
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ff277d5
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What do they mean to you?" he asked, leaning back into the portable thicket of his gray vested suit. Beverly took back her pages and studied them. After a while, she looked up. "They mean to me that the universe . . . growls, and sings. No, shouts." The learned astronomer was shocked. In dealing with the public he was often confronted by lunatics and visionaries, some of whose theories were elegant, some absurd, and some, perhaps, right on ..
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Mark Helprin |
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68341d6
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All great discoveries," the elder Marratta had once said, "are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents." At"
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Mark Helprin |
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9fecfb9
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For the first time in his life, he felt exactly what he was, and he was not impressed.
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Mark Helprin |
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67ab62c
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Mr. de Pinto, the dog who protects sheep quickly learns how to direct them, and it becomes a habit. The people have been trained by their watchmen to jump, and to trample what the watchmen want trampled. "I have found, in many cities and in some places that were not yet cities, that those who would guard the people are their governors. The government admits that it is a government. The press pretends that it is not. But what a pretense! You..
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Mark Helprin |
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aeed669
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There are times for sleep, for inactivity, dreaming, indiscipline, even lethargy. You'll know when you deserve these times. They come after you've been broken.
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Mark Helprin |
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b727a54
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to defeat pain he had to separate it from time, its most useful ally.
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Mark Helprin |
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bbc73ca
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Nothing is born as strong as it can become.
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Mark Helprin |
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aa43b6a
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Rome was not meant to move, but to be beautiful. The wind was supposed to be the fastest thing here, and the trees, bending and swaying, to slow it down. Now
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Mark Helprin |
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e5e6616
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Its funny, as soon as you lose faith, you have children, and life reawakens.
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Mark Helprin |
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9560620
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The eighth and ninth floors housed the library. It had several million volumes in open stacks, all the major newspapers and periodicals either bound or on computer, and a map section. Expert librarians maneuvered a seemingly limitless budget to keep it well maintained and up-to-date. The reference collections were wonders of the world.
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Mark Helprin |
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0dc3dc2
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These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, r..
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Mark Helprin |
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553ae6a
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They always say about the soldier that he's detached. That's true, for he's been in the eye of the storm, his heart has been broken, and he doesn't even know it.
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Mark Helprin |
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60801bc
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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...
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Mark Helprin |