Mediterranean Basin Quotes

GARDENS OR FIELDS? Craig Blomberg points out that in Matthew's parable of the mustard seed, the sower sows his seed in a "field" (agros, Matt 13:31), while in Luke the sowing is in a "garden" (kepos, Luke 13:19). Jews never grew mustard plants in gardens, but always out on farms, while Greeks in the Mediterranean basin did the opposite. It appears that each gospel writer was changing the word that Jesus used in Mark - the word for "earth" or "ground" (ge, Mark 4:31) - for the sake of his hearers. There is a technical contradiction between the Matthean and Lukan terms, states Blomberg, "but not a material one. Luke changes the wording precisely so that his audience is not distracted from ... the lesson by puzzling over an ... improbable practice." The result is that Luke's audience "receives his teaching with the same impact as the original audience."22 ~ Timothy Keller

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. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Thus an excess of directness and a want of art, in the second phase, robbed Caesar of his chance of ending the war in one campaign, and condemned him to four more years of obstinate warfare all round the Mediterranean basin. ~ B.H. Liddell Hart

The first western gardens were those in the Mediterranean basin. There in the desert areas stretching from North Africa to the valleys of the Euphrates, the so-called cradle of civilization, where plants were first grown for crops by settled communities, garden enclosures were also constructed. Gardens emphasized the contrast between two separate worlds: the outer one where nature remained awe-inspiringly in control and an inner artificially created sanctuary, a refuge for man and plants from the burning desert, where shade trees and cool canals refreshed the spirit and ensured growth. ~ Penelope Hobhouse

The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York. ~ Freeman Dyson

I am from the Mediterranean area, I have to feel everything. I am a physical person, but I guess that things that you cannot touch and cannot see are also touchable and visible - light, poetry, music. ~ Jaume Plensa

One wishes to go on. On this great river one could glide forever-and here we discover the definition of bliss, salvation, Heaven, all the old Mediterranean dreams: a journey from wonder to wonder, drifting through eternity into ever-deeper, always changing grandeur, through beauty continually surpassing itself: the ultimate Homeric voyage. ~ Edward Abbey

Against all the odds, we built a better navy than theirs - from scratch - in two months! We now rule the waves in the Mediterranean Sea - Our Sea! The day will come - it begins today - when Rome will master the world! Alexander will roll in his grave, Atlantis will decay in her decadence, and these demons of Harappa will entertain Hades with their theatrics this very night. But Rome will live on in fame and glory. It starts with our victory today! ~ Jennifer McKeithen

Lately we have been getting facts pointing to the "oceanic" nature of the floor of so-called inland seas. Through geological investigations it has been definitely established that in its deepest places, for instance, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, the Earth's crust is devoid of granite stratum. The same may be said quite confidently about the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Could the interpretation of these data be that inland seas were the primary stage of the formation of oceanic basins? ~ Vladimir Belousov

Rhoda comes now, having slipped in while we were not looking. She must have made a tortuous course, taking cover now behind a waiter, now behind some ornamental pillar, so as to put off as long as possible the shock of recognition, so as to be secure for one more moment to rock her petals in her basin. We wake her. We torture her. She dreads us, she despises us, yet she comes cringing to our sides because for al our cruelty there is always some name, some face which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams. ~ Virginia Woolf

You could look at the work of any Dutch master for an idea of the morning light we cycle through. There is a white cleanness to it, a rinsed quality. It's a sober light, without, for example, any of the orange particulate glow you get from the Mediterranean sun. ~ Russell Shorto

A short distance away is the Tidal Basin, ringed by cherry trees that every year produce flowers, an event to which Washingtonians react as though it were the Second Coming of Christ. ~ Dave Barry

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. ~ Frantz Fanon

The Nile, draining out into the Mediterranean. The bright lights of Cairo announce the opening of the north-flowing river's delta, with Jerusalem's answering high beams to the northeast. This 4,258 mile braid of human life, first navigated end-to-end in 2004, is visible in a single glance from space. ~ Chris Hadfield

The greatest mercy, I have often thought, of the Mediterranean coast lies in its mosquitoes. Did we not suffer from their unwelcome attention, we could not bear our holidays to end. ~ Winifred Holtby

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of 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 dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And 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-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. ~ Robinson Jeffers

I missed all the people and places I didn't know if I would ever see again – my grandparents and their cute little house at Basin Head, where we used to visit the beach everyday and I would run barefoot over the singing sands and swim in the impossibly enormous ocean. ~ Rachael Arsenault

When he took my hand he taught me something about the value of touch, the communicative power of the human hand. I didn't know, as I lay there, that I would think of him many times in the years ahead. When my son lay on a hospital bed, age four, with the raging fever of meningitis, I reached through the bodies of the attending doctors and held his slack, heated hand in both of mine. When my youngest child disappeared beneath the waves of the Mediterranean Sea and I had to leap in, haul her out, turn her upside-down so that the water drained from her lungs. Then all she and I could do was sit on the sand, wrapped in towels, contemplating what had almost happened, her small fingers wrapped in mine. ~ Maggie O'Farrell

Willow gazed up at him, her silly grin still in place. "You know wha'? You're kinda cute when you crook your eyebrows down like tha'."
Rider muttered a curse, lifted her off the floor, and tossed her over his shoulder. "Juan, you and Hicks help Mrs. Brigham to her room. I'll take care of this little hellion."
Willow lifted her head from where she dangled over Rider's shoulder. "See yuh later, Mrs. B."
Miriam smiled and waved.
"i think Mrs. B is pickled," Rider's passenger said in a loud whisper as he hauled her out the door.
"No thanks to you,hellion," he growled, and smacked her bottom.
"Ow!"
As he carried Willow into the house, Rider was hard pressed to quell a sudden urge to laugh. In her bedroom, he unceremoniously dumped her on her bed, but when he turned to leave, her pitiful sounding voice halted his exit. "Rider,come here a min-it."
"Oh,hell, I suppose you're going to be sick." Grabbing a basin off her dresser, he shoved it under her chin. "It serves you right, you know." He watched nervously as she knocked the bowl aside.
"Dun...don't be mad." She held her arms out to him. "Come closer. Gimme a kiss and we'll make up. I like your kisses so-o-o-o much."
This time Rider couldn't stall his grin and inadvertently leaned closer.
She was on him like a duck on a June bug. With two hearty handfuls of his shirt, she yanked him down on top of her and plastered her mouth against his.
Talking against his lips, the tipsy ~ Charlotte McPherren

Depending on the places we passed, the night around us shaded from ink black to red to purple to a washed-out yellow that hung like gauze in front of the dark, like you could see the dark sitting under the light, and then it would be back to ink black, and the air would change smells from sea salt to pine pulp to ammonia and burning oil. Trees and marshland crowded us and we passed over the Atchafalaya Basin, a long bridge suspended over a liquid murk, and I thought about the dense congestion of vines and forest when I was a kid, how the green and leafy things had seemed so full of shadows, and how it had felt like half the world was hidden in those shadows. ~ Nic Pizzolatto

God Bless Your Fingers

Ten sugar-dipped strawberries. Ten humming sailors. Let the church say amen. Let the chapel doors open and open again. Ten gentle explorers who found my body buried inside itself. Who can see in the dark. Who can baptize me from across the continent. Let the church of my legs say bless. Let the church of my breasts say oh god. You have found the presents I hid from you. You have grown in me a basin I can never fill. Ten wise men. Ten pilgrimages across my stomach. Ten lit candles. Ten holy ghosts. I am a séance. I am a séance. ~ Sierra DeMulder

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people. ~ Antal Szerb

Grandmother had had to be frugal all her life, and so she had a weakness for extravagance. She watched the basin and the barrels and every crevice in the granite fill with water and overflow. She looked at the mattresses out being aired and the dishes that were washing themselves. She sighed contentedly, and, absorbed in thought, she filled a coffee cup with precious drinking water and poured it over a daisy. ~ Tove Jansson

Yes, there were good memories, too, thirty-seven years of good and bad. Quarrels and reconciliations. Eight cradles and too many gravestones and Rosamund Clifford and power that rivalled Caesar's, an empire that stretched from the Scots border to the Mediterranean Sea. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master - I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov - my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood. ~ Maxim Gorky

On its third rising only a portion of the drawing-room was disclosed; the rest being concealed by a screen, hung with some sort of dark and coarse drapery. The marble basin was removed; in its place, stood a deal table and a kitchen chair: these objects were visible by a very dim light proceeding from a horn lantern, the wax candles being all extinguished. ~ Charlotte Bronte

A recent report by UNEP and Interpol estimated that between 50 to 90 per cent of logging in key tropical countries of the Amazon basin, Central Africa and South East Asia is being carried out by organized crime. This threatens not only attempts to eradicate poverty and deforestation but also efforts to combat climate change. ~ Achim Steiner

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. ~ Rodney Stark

I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners. ~ Alan Bennett

Early as it was, every one had breakfasted, and my basin of bread and milk was put on the oven-top to await my coming down. Every one was gone about their work. The first to come into the house-place was Phillis with a basket of eggs. Faithful to my resolution, I asked -
"What are those?"
She looked at me for a moment, and then said gravely -
"Potatoes!"
"No! they are not," said I. "They are eggs. What do you mean by saying they are potatoes?"
"What do you mean by asking me what they were, when they are plain to be seen?" retorted she.
We were both getting a little angry with each other. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

I asked a man who took a death boat to Europe across the treachelous waters of the Mediterranean from Libya
"Why are you taking this death boat".
"I am already dead." He said. This is my coffin. If I succeed to get to the other side, I get a new life. If I fail, I loose nothing. I remain what I am now: Dead. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

That night, how could I sleep?
I lay and watched the lonely gloom;
And watched the moonlight creep
From wall to basin, round the room.
All night I could not sleep. ~ Rupert Brooke

A voyage to Europe in the summer of 1921 gave me the first opportunity of observing the wonderful blue opalescence of the Mediterranean Sea. It seemed not unlikely that the phenomenon owed its origin to the scattering of sunlight by the molecules of the water. ~ C. V. Raman

I never go to the gym - I can't be doing with it. But I run up and down the stairs, wash my feet in the basin to keep supple, and I don't eat things that have a pulse. ~ Joanna Lumley

Even people who know nothing about Greece know something about Greece. The very name sparks visions of ancient civilizations that dominated the Mediterranean. ~ Polly Letofsky

The thrill of tramping alone and unafraid through a wilderness of lakes, creeks, alpine meadows, and glaciers is not known to many. A civilization can be built around the machine but it is doubtful that a meaningful life can be produced by it ... When man worships at the feet of avalas creations. When he feels the wind blowing through him on a high peak or sleeps under a closely matted white bark pine in an exposed basin, he is apt to find his relationship to the universe. ~ William O. Douglas

He nodded to her right forearm, not trusting himself to speak. His gloves lay on the other side of the basin, black against the gold-veined marble. They looked like dead animals. He focused on the shears, cold metal in his hands, nothing like skin. He could not do this if his hands were shaking. I can best this, he told himself. ~ Leigh Bardugo

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. ~ David Ginola

He has spoken blasphemy." This was a wrong charge to bring - for Pilate, having his superstition again aroused - is even more afraid to put him to death. And he comes out again, and says, "I find no fault in Him." What a strong contest between good and evil in that man's heart! But they cried out again, "If you let this man go you are not Caesar's friend." They hit the mark this time, and he yields to their clamor. He brings forth a basin of water, and he washes his hands before them all, and he says, "I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it." A poor way of escaping! That water could not wash the blood from his hands, though their cry did bring the blood on their heads - "His blood be on us, and on our children. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Every war and every conflict between human beings has happened because of some disagreement about names. It is such an unnecessary foolishness, because just beyond the arguing there is a long table of companionship set and waiting for us to sit down. What is praised is one, so the praise is one too, many jugs being poured into a huge basin. All religions, all this singing one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. Sunlight looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall and a lot different on this other one, but it is still one light. We have borrowed these clothes, these time-and-space personalities, from a light, and when we praise, we are pouring them back in. ~ Rumi

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 ~ Tom Turner

Forests and trees make significant direct contributions to the nutrition of poor households ... [as] rural communities in Central Africa obtained a critical portion of protein and fat in their diets through hunting wildlife from in and around forests. The five to six million tonnes of bushmeat eaten yearly in the Congo Basin is roughly equal to the total amount of beef produced annually in Brazil - without the accompanying need to clear huge swathes of forest for cattle. ~ Frances Ford Seymour

The Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes - Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin. ~ James Lovelock

I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years. ~ David Guterson