“I prefer not to elaborate on the various stages of our dealings over the next few days - disbelief, anger, recrimination, the raking up of old sores, bitter silence and so on - but I can say that t...”

“Whisper it softly, but many Greeks, including clergy, welcomed the Ottomans. On the whole Muslim rulers have been much more tolerant of infidels than their Christian counterparts have. As long as t...”

“When we westerners pray we join our hands, close our eyes, kneel, hunch up and put our hands over our faces to close up our bodies. Our God is inside us, his universe inside our heads. When Orthodo...”

“For many of our Greek friends a book is a final desperate attempt to fill the existential void when there is no one to talk to, nothing to do, no television to view, nothing in the street to watch ...”

“Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The const...”

“It was tempting to take refuge in feelings of British superiority, although I disliked myself for it and hoped it didn't show.”

“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”

“Call no man happy until he is dead.”

“It is not easy to soothe the immortal gods from their vengeance.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”