Dear Mark Helprin....

....your words are truffles for the soul.

The Winter's Tale p. 542

"They are symbols and products of the imagination which is the force that ensures justice and historical momentum in an imperfect world, because without imagination we would not have the wherewithal to challenge certainty, and we could never rise above ourselves"

In Sunlight and in Shadow  P5

"He would not abandon until the day  he died the self-discipline, alacrity, and resolution that would enable him to stretch to the limit in defending that which was delicate, transient, and vulnerable, that which and those whom he loved the most."

P6

"To be in New York on a beautiful day is to feel razor-close to being in love."

P159

Everything that's 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!"

In Sunlight and In Shadow, p 645

"Souls", he said, "like rays of light, exist in perfect parallel equality, always.  But when for 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 difficult span when 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 extent to which they succeed is called justice.  And the energy lost in the effort is called sacrifice.

"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 a 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."