Mediterranean Quotes

1. "Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting on impulse. But--on the top of that--he had merely urged her to be true to it. She swore once more that she would stick to her guns. The black mood fell from her. She turned and looked upon the sea, now far below. The sun, a hollow orb of molten glory, hung quivering in the mist of the Mediterranean; and Lisa entered for a moment into a perfect peace of spirit. She became once with Nature, instead of a being eternally at war with it."
Author: Aleister Crowley

2. "Right now I'd love to be sitting on a Greek island somewhere because of being Greek American, eating great octopus salad and some fantastic lamb. Or sipping a little ouzo. I think the Mediterranean diet is one of the healthiest... Lots of nuts, vegetables, fruits, fresh fish, lean meats, yogurt."
Author: Cat Cora

3. "I have had my mother's wing of my genetic ancestry analyzed by the National Geographic tracing service and there it all is: the arrow moving northward from the African savannah, skirting the Mediterranean by way of the Levant, and passing through Eastern and Central Europe before crossing to the British Isles. And all of this knowable by an analysis of the cells on the inside of my mouth.I almost prefer the more rambling and indirect and journalistic investigation, which seems somehow less… deterministic."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

4. "All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

5. "Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists?If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

6. "I have been keeping myself fit. I am going on holiday next week in the Mediterranean so that I can really unwind after the football season and have a rest."
Author: David Ginola

7. "My parents are artists and they decided they would prefer to paint in the Mediterranean rather than in Scotland."
Author: David Russell

8. "Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America."
Author: Edward Ball

9. "If I ever complain about yachting around the Mediterranean with Madonna, who I just idolized as a child, I should be slapped across the face."
Author: Elizabeth Banks

10. "Is France a northern European export powerhouse, or a Mediterranean indebted and dependent economy? Yes to both."
Author: Francois Hollande

11. "Taking the continent as a whole, this religious tension may be responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feeling. Africa is divided into Black and White, and the names that are substituted- Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara- do not manage to hide this latent racism. Here, it is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco-Latin civilization. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized - in a word, savage."
Author: Frantz Fanon

12. "She was, in fact, one of those people of exalted principles; one of those opinionated puritans, of which England produces so many; one of those good and insupportable old maids who haunt the tables d'hôte of every hotel in Europe, who spoil Italy, poison Switzerland, render the charming cities of the Mediterranean uninhabitable, carry everywhere their fantastic manias, their manners of petrified vestals, their indescribable toilets and a certain odor of india-rubber which makes one believe that at night they are slipped into a rubber casing."
Author: Guy De Maupassant

13. "I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better."
Author: Harry Mathews

14. "I believe that Palestine is an occupied land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, and this is the right of the entire Palestinian people, this land."
Author: Hassan Nasrallah

15. "The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West."
Author: Henri Pirenne

16. "The cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity."
Author: Henri Pirenne

17. "I really like rustic mediterranean cooking. And I like trying out curry takeaways."
Author: Jack Dee

18. "Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base."
Author: Jared Diamond

19. "And, these Islamic fundamentalists, these radical terrorists, these Middle Eastern monsters are committed to destroying the Jewish nation, driving her into the Mediterranean, conquering the world."
Author: Jerry Falwell

20. "Fish him out!" Mr. Cyclops urged. "Hurry!" The whole class was staring at her in horror. Athena looked down at the map just in time to see Odysseus sink into the Mediterranean Sea. She"
Author: Joan Holub

21. "We at length, when we had captured as many fish as we could possibly utilize, set about cleaning and preparing their flesh. Some we salted, some we dried like the herrings, some we treated like the tunny of the Mediterranean—we prepared them in oil. Of the roe of the sturgeon I decided to form caviare, the great Russian dish. I removed from it all the membranes by which it is surrounded, washed it in vinegar, salted it, pressed out all the moisture caused by the wet-absorbing properties of the salt, packed it in small barrels, and"
Author: Johann David Wyss

22. "I'm sorry . . ." She shrugs, glancing back at him. "Gotta admit he's hot, though, Livie. He looks like a Mediterranean underwear model. There'd be no coyote-ugly situation in the morning there."
Author: K.A. Tucker

23. "Although when Christianity appeared the total population of the planet was only a fraction of that of the twentieth century, most of the earth's surface was quite outside the Mediterranean world, Persia, India, and China."
Author: Kenneth Scott Latourette

24. "It had to unleash some invisible magic, he thought; Hades and Persephone, joining together again within these black and holy stone walls, for the first time in millennia. As they indulged in enjoying one another, how could they not be reactivating some power within the Earth itself? Surely they were at least bringing autumn storm clouds rolling and thundering over the Mediterranean.But probably every boy felt that way when finally in bed caressing the girl he loved."
Author: Molly Ringle

25. "We must break up the eurozone. We must set those Mediterranean countries free."
Author: Nigel Farage

26. "The only clear expression of intellectual dissent from hydraulic despotism occurred in the southern half of the coastal lands of the eastern Mediterranean, called variously Canaan, Palestine, Israel, Judah, and today, Israel again. Here and in a satellite Jewish colony in Iraq, between 800 and 500 B.C., visionaries ("the Prophets") -- namely Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah (at least two different writers writing under this name), and Jeremiah -- wrote elegant poems calling for social justice in the world and a freer, more open and humanitarian society."
Author: Norman F. Cantor

27. "The classical heritage as shaped by and filtered through Roman culture had two great flaws. First, it prevented the very rich oral cultures of the ancient Mediterranean from surviving from antiquity into later times. All that was left as creative forces were Greek philosophy and Roman law. These were very substantial cultures but they represented a great narrowing of what could be passed on from antiquity to later centuries..."Second, another deficiency of classical culture was its lack of social conscience, its obliviousness to the slavery, poverty, disease, and everyday cruelty endured by more than half of the fifty million people who inhabited the empire. The classical heritage represented a narrow and insensitive social and political theory reinforcing a miserably class-ridden and technologically stagnant society."
Author: Norman F. Cantor

28. "I cook croquetas, and I eat jamon. I keep my diet 100% Mediterranean and drink my Rioja. In that sense, I have a piece of Spain in West Hollywood."
Author: Paz Vega

29. "Logic is a mere iceberg in the Mediterranean of wisdom."
Author: Raheel Farooq

30. "If I tell you that Mrs. Robbins had bad teeth and looked like a horse, you will laugh at me as a cliché-monger; yet it is the truth. I can do nothing with the teeth; but let me tell you that she looked like a French horse, a dark, Mediterranean, market-type horse that has all its life begrudged to the poor the adhesive-tape on a torn five-franc note - that has tiptoed (to save its shoes) for centuries along that razor-edge where Greed and Caution meet."
Author: Randall Jarrell

31. "If you've ever seen the film In Which We Serve, but it was about a destroyer in the Mediterranean."
Author: Richard Attenborough

32. "In English and Arabic. Clearly, even personal shoppers had him pegged as a complete geek. The shopper also managed to find some supplies for our magic bags—blocks of wax, twine, even some papyrus and ink—though I doubt Bes explained to her what they were for. After she left, Bes, Carter and I ordered more food from room service. We sat on the deck and watched the afternoon go by. The breeze from the Mediterranean was cool and pleasant. Modern Alexandria stretched out to our left—an odd mix of gleaming high-rises, shabby, crumbling buildings, and ancient ruins. The shoreline highway was dotted with palm trees and crowded with every sort of vehicle from BMWs to donkeys. From our penthouse suite, it all seemed a bit unreal—the raw energy of the city, the bustle and congestion below —while we sat on our veranda in the sky eating fresh fruit and the last melting bits of Lenin's head."
Author: Rick Riordan

33. "I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below."
Author: Robert Fitzgerald

34. "The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,The blue pool in the old garden,More than five thousand years has drunk sacrificeOf ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfsNor any future world-quarrel of westeringAnd eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like dolphins through the grey sea-smokeInto pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulgingEyeball of water, arched over to Asia,Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this is the staring unsleepingEye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars."
Author: Robinson Jeffers

35. "Many critics of the Crusades would seem to suppose that after the Muslims had overrun a major portion of Christendom, they should have been ignored or forgiven; suggestions have been made about turning the other cheek. This outlook is certainly unrealistic and probably insincere. Not only had the Byzantines lost most of their empire; the enemy was at their gates. And the loss of Spain, Sicily, and southern Italy, as well as a host of Mediterranean islands, was bitterly resented in Europe. Hence, as British historian Derek Lomax (1933-1992) explained, 'The popes, like most Christians, believed war against the Muslims to be justified partly because the latter had usurped by force lands which once belonged to Christians and partly because they abused the Christians over whom they ruled and such Christian lands as they could raid for slaves, plunder and the joys of destruction.' It was time to strike back."
Author: Rodney Stark

36. "All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try."
Author: Sheri S. Tepper

37. "A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age..... Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one."
Author: Stacy Schiff

38. "Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot."
Author: Stephen Fry

39. "In Morocco, it's possible to see the Atlantic and the Mediterranean at the same time."
Author: Tahar Ben Jelloun

40. "I cook everything. I love Mediterranean cooking, I love Asian cooking. I do lots of Japanese noodles."
Author: Ted Allen

41. "CLEOPATRA TO THE ASPThe bright mirror I braved: the devil in itLoved me like my soul, my soul:Now that I seek myself in a serpentMy smile is fatal.Nile moves in me; my thighs splayInto the squalled Mediterranean;My brain hides in that AbyssiniaLost armies foundered towards.Desert and river unwrinkle again.Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunkCaesar, Pompey, Antony I drank.Now let the snake reign.A half-deity out of Capricorn,This rigid Augustus mountsWith his sword virginal indeed; and has shornSummarily the moon-horned riverFrom my bed. May the moonRuin him with virginity! Drink me, now, wholeWith coiled Egypt's past; then from my deltaSwim like a fish toward Rome."
Author: Ted Hughes

42. "Because we're all rainbow-colored inside, each of us a different arrangement, of course. The kiss just makes all the colors more concentrated, so intense they can be hard to look at. Or feel, rather. Like a Mediterranean sunset."
Author: Tess Callahan

43. "Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer that can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted…of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?"
Author: Thomas Pynchon

44. "Spices are very hot, very hip. I love spices. I've always loved the Mediterranean flavors."
Author: Todd English

45. "One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe"
Author: Tom Turner

46. "A Mediterranean city is really my culture."
Author: Zinedine Zidane

Mediterranean Quotes Pictures