Crete Quotes

“If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!”
― Shel Silverstein

“An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave - I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing - but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

“But, as a form of exercise, I cannot recommend carrying a suitcase for a mile or so along sand and shingle at the dead of night, and then edging one's way along a narrow path where a false step will mean plunging into a couple of fathoms of sea that, however quiet, is toothed like a shark with jagged fangs of rock.”
― Mary Stewart, The Moon-Spinners

“The carved images on the early Minoan sealstones are tantalising, inscrutable. The Nature Goddess is yanked from the soil like a snake or a sheaf of barley; the Mistress of the Animals suckles goats and gazelles. There are male Adorants certainly - up on tiptoe, their outstretched arms hoisted in a kind of heil, their bodies arched suggestively, pelvis forward, before the Goddess - but there are no masculine deities, not a single one in sight. No woman worth her salt, one might think, could fail to be intrigued.”
― Alison Fell, The Element -inth in Greek

“There us a kind of flame in Crete - let us call it "soul" - something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and imponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are a human being, and at the same time tremble. (Report to Greco)”
― N. Kazantzakis

“Biffi said it was more American on an air force base in Crete than it was in Times Square.”
― Cathleen Schine, Fin & Lady

“Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor one who could coax sugar from a lemon. Hers was the frontal attack with no inhibitions. She told the Nazis you could not trust Hitler, and they let her go. In the days of chaperones, she hitch-hiked a ride on a French destroyer along the coast of Crete; 'All quite proper, I had my cook with me,' she explained.”
― Mary Allsebrook

“There is a kind of flame in Crete - let us call it "soul" - something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and imponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are human being, and at the same time tremble. (Report to Greco)”
― N. Kazantzakis

“Love of liberty, the refusal to accept your soul's enslavement, not even in exchange for paradise; stalwart games over and above love and pain, over and above death; smashing even the most sacrosant of the molds when they are unable to contain you any longer - these are the great cries of Crete. (Report to Greco)”
― N. Kazantzakis

“I had allowed my body to take whatever path it wished. The fact that it was guiding me and not I it gave me great pleasure. I had confidence. The body is not blind unwrought material when bathed in Greek light; it is suffused with abundant soul which makes it phosphoresce, and it left free, it is able to arrive at its own decision and find the correct road without the mind's intervention. Conversely, the soul is not an invisible airy phantom; it has taken on some body's sureness and warmth in its own right, and it savors the world with what you might call carnal pleasure, as though it had a mouth and nostrils and hands with which to caress this world. Man often lacks the persistence to maintain all of his humanity. He mutilates himself. Sometimes he wishes to be released from his soul sometimes from his body. To enjoy both together seems a heavy sentence. But here in Greece these two graceful, deathless elements are able to commingle like hot water with cold, the soul to take something from the body, the body from the soul. They become friends, and thus man, here on Greece's divine threshing floor, is able to live and journey unmutilated, intact. (Report to Greco)”
― N. Kazantzakis

“I had allowed my body to take whatever path it wished. The fact that it was guiding me and not I it gave me great pleasure. I had confidence. The body is not blind unwrought material when bathed in Greek light; it is suffused with abundant soul which makes it phosphoresce, and is left free, it is able to arrive at its own decision and find the correct road without the mind's intervention. Conversely, the soul is not an invisible airy phantom; it has taken on some body's sureness and warmth in its own right, and it savors the world with what you might call carnal pleasure, as though it had a mouth and nostrils and hands with which to caress this world. Man often lacks the persistence to maintain all of his humanity. He mutilates himself. Sometimes he wishes to be released from his soul sometimes from his body. To enjoy both together seems a heavy sentence. But here in Greece these two graceful, deathless elements are able to commingle like hot water with cold, the soul to take something from the body, the body from the soul. They become friends, and thus man, here on Greece's divine threshing floor, is able to live and journey unmutilated, intact. (Report to Greco)”
― N. Kazantzakis

“Sugar-cube houses spilled down the last slope toward the sea. A full moon floated above the inky water; the air from the gardens they passed smelled of gardenias and jasmine.
She slept as soon as she put her head on the pillow of the small white hotel room. When she opened the creaky blue shutters the following morning, brilliant sunlight fell in through the window and the hum of the bees on the vines below filled the room. The sea was every color of delphinium and larkspur. The smell of food drifted up from the small restaurant below her balcony. Bacon, fresh bread, coffee, cinnamon.”
― Ella Griffin, The Flower Arrangement

“Daedalus took comfort in the baby Icarus, and I loved to see him walking about with the infant dandled in his arms, showing the oblivious child the flowers and the birds and the many wonders of the palace.”
― Jennifer Saint, Ariadne

“I had not fooled myself with false hope. I was a goddess, and he a mortal, and both of us were imprisoned. But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“The gallant captain vacated his cabin for her, and Manna changed her role from cook to chaperone. All most correct. But it was hardly the done thing to cadge a lift on a torpedo boat. Yet she did it twice in a lifetime.”
― Mary Allsebrook, Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes

“Ξάφνου μ' ένα χαμόγελο θυμόμουν τους πατέρες Διόνυσο και Γαβριήλ, τους αδερφούς Θεοφύλακτο, Χρίστο και Πολύκαρπο, τους γενάτους, μακρυμάλληδες, καλημαυχοφόρους οικοδεσπότες και προστάτες μου στην Κρήτη κατά την διάρκεια του πολέμου, που ‘βάζαν τις ρακές, έσπαγαν καρύδια, έλεγαν τραγούδια του βουνού, έλυναν κι έδεναν πιστόλια, μου έκαναν ατελείωτες ερωτήσεις για τον Τσόρτσιλ και ροχάλιζαν κάτω από τα λιόδεντρα, ενώ οι αχτίδες του ήλιου έπεφταν κάθετα στο Λιβυκό Πέλαγος.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence

“Commentators like the historian Cathy Gere have repeatedly pointed out that the “restored” Minoan palace came to resemble modernist works—Lenin’s Mausoleum or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy.”
― Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins