Quotes from Adam Nicolson

The place has entered me...it has coloured my life like a stain.

A puritan is such a one as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbor with all his heart.

The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles

Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations," Gautier said calmly. "They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he's a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.

Cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man's life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted Nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth's barrier.

American gang members talk about themselves, their lives, their ambitions, their idea of fate, the role of violence and revenge, in ways that are strangely like the Greeks in the Iliad.

Iliad's subject is not war or its wickedness but a crisis in how to be.

Do you, like Agamemnon, attempt to dominate your world?

Do you, like Hector, think of your family above all and weaken your resolve by doing that?

Or do you, like Achilles, believe in the dignity of love and the purity of honor as the only things that matter in the face of death?

Until the twentieth century, no one had any idea that Homer might have existed in this strange and immaterial form. It was the assumption that Homer, like other poets, wrote his poetry. Virgil, Dante and Milton were merely following in his footsteps. The only debate was over why these written poems were in places written so badly. Why had he not written them better?

You can either do what your integrity tells you to do, or niftily find your way around the obstacles life throws in your path.

One eighteenth-century bard was given a lovely estate in Harris by his MacLeod chief

Pause for a moment and a place will pool out around you, not as an illusion but as a fact, in details it would not have had if you had not stopped to look.

for which he had to pay "1 panegyrick poem every year." That is Homeric rent.

Among William Brewster's own children, landing at Plymouth Rock, were Fear, Love, Patience and Wrestling Brewster.

Even the English Roman Catholics, at their college in Rheims and then Douai, had applied a small team of men to the job.

We are wanderers, place shifters, the cosmic homeless. This is not a modern truth, and Achilles is not some new kind of existentialist hero. It is the oldest truth of all, surviving uncomfortably into the modern world of cities and overkings, diplomacy and accommodation, the power structures and the proliferation of stuff which the Mediterranean world provides.

The experience of the world broadens with the reality of other creatures made vivid within it.

say, 'There never was such a person as Homer,'" the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841.

The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority.

William Bedwell was both a leading mathematician and, because his readings in medieval mathematical studies had led him down this path, an Arabist, one of England's first. He was no admirer of Islam, being the author of a vituperative book on 'the blasphemous seducer Mohammed', but he was captivated by the theological, medical and mathematical genius of the Arabs. Arabic, he was also convinced, was an invaluable tool in the interpretation of Hebrew.

She revived the extraordinary Anglo-Saxon word dustsceawung, meaning 'the fascination experienced by someone looking at a ruin, a kind of daydream of dust, pondering that which has been lost: dust-seeing, dust-chewing, dust-cheering. The daydream of a mind strung between past and present.

U re u re na-nam Gi re gi re na-nam Mu re mu re na-nam