“If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”
Mahmoud Darwich (1941–2008) Palestinian writer
“The island lies like a strange, misshapen dagger in the blue Ionian Sea, midway along the Greek and Albanian coastlines.
In the past, it has fallen into the hands of a dozen different nations, from all of which it has absorbed what it found good and rejected the rest, thus keeping its individuality. Unlike so many parts of Greece, it is green and lush, for when it was part of the Venetian empire they used it as their oil store, planting thousands of olive trees, so that now the bulk of the island is shaded by these carunculated giants with their wigs of silvery-green leaves. Between them run the admonishing fingers of black-green cypress, many planted in groves as dowries. All this creates a mystical landscape, bathed in sharp brittle sunlight, orchestrated by the knife-grinder song of the cicadas, framed in the blue, still sea. Of all the wonderful and fascinating parts of the planet I have been privileged to visit, Corfu is the nearest approach to home for me, since it was here, nurtured in sunlight, that my fascination for the living world around me came to fruition.”
How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist (1984)
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Gerald Durrell38
naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and televisi… 1925–1995Related quotes
Margaret Wise Brown book The Little Island
Variant: nights and days came and passed
and summer and winter
and the sun and the wind
and the rain.
and it was good to be a little island
a part of the world
and a world of its own
all surrounded by the bright blue sea.
Source: The Little Island
VII, Frg. 9, Loeb
Geographica, 7 BC
Dimitrije Tucović book Serbia and Albania
Review of "Serbia and Albania" by Dimitrije Tucovic http://www.labournet.net/balkans/0003/serbrvw.html
Cristoforo Colombo (1451–1506) Explorer, navigator, and colonizer
28 October 1492
Journal of the First Voyage
“When the existence and safety of so many nations depend upon your single life, and so large a part of the world has chosen you for its head, it is cruel of you to court death.”
Cum tot in hac anima populorum vita salusque
pendeat et tantus caput hoc sibi fecerit orbis,
saevitia est voluisse mori.
Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia
Book V, line 685 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
William St Clair (1937) author
Source: That Greece Might Still be Free (1972), p. 15-16.
Context: Whether the present inhabitants of Greece are descended from the Ancient Greeks is a profoundly unsatisfactory question. No method of subdividing the question makes much sense. On the one hand, one can attempt to trace the numerous incursions of immigrants to Greece and try to assess the extent to which the ‘blood’ of the Ancients has been diluted by outside races, Romans, barbarians, Franks, Turks, Venetians, Albanians, etc. On the other hand, one can point to the remarkable survival of ideas and customs and, in particular, to the astonishing strength of the linguistic tradition.
Harald V of Norway (1937) King of Norway
Garden party in the Palace Park: welcoming speech (September 1, 2016)