"It was her last breakfast with Bapi, her last morning in Greece. In her frenetic bliss that kept her up till dawn, she’d scripted a whole conversation in Greek for her and Bapi to have as their grand finale of the summer. Now she looked at him contentedly munching on his Rice Krispies, waiting for the right juncture for launchtime.

He looked up at her briefly and smiled, and she realized something important. This was how they both liked it. Though most people felt bonded by conversation, Lena and Bapi were two of a kind who didn’t. They bonded by the routine of just eating cereal together.

She promptly forgot her script and went back to her cereal.

At one point, when she was down to just milk, Bapi reached over and put his hand on hers. ‘You’re my girl,’ he said.

And Lena knew she was.
"
— Ann Brashares (The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants)

"Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea."
— Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek)

"Επιθυμίες
Σαν σώματα ωραία νεκρών που δεν εγέρασαν
και τάκλεισαν, με δάκρυα, σε μαυσωλείο λαμπρό,
με ρόδα στο κεφάλι και στα πόδια γιασεμιά --
έτσ' η επιθυμίες μοιάζουν που επέρασαν
χωρίς να εκπληρωθούν· χωρίς ν' αξιωθεί καμιά
της ηδονής μια νύχτα, ή ένα πρωϊ της φεγγερό."

Desires
"Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a brilliant mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet --
this is what desires resemble that have passed
without fulfillment; without any of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a morning of brightness."
— Constantine P. Cavafy (Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy)

"Know thyself"
— Temple of Apollo at Delphi

"Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having no alternative, followed. "
— Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)

"Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen."
— Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals)

"… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder."
— Yannis Ritsos (The Fourth Dimension)

"And there they ring the walls, the young, the lithe. The handsome hold the graves they won in Troy; the enemy earth rides over those who conquered.
"
— Aeschylus (Agamemnon)

"The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. Then the Christian religion appeared in Byzantium and the centres of learning were eliminated, their vestiges effaced and the edifice of Greek learning was obliterated. Everything the ancient Greeks had brought to light vanished, and the discoveries of the ancients were altered out of recognition."
— Al Masudi (From The Meadows of Gold)

"But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)"
— Joseph Reese Strayer (On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State)

"brown-capped porcini, yellow chanterelles, and oysters, every hillside ablaze with multicolored mushrooms, tasty and not nourishing in the slightest."
— Ioanna Karystiani (The Jasmine Isle)