Byzantium Quotes

“...while cleverness is appropriate to rhetoric, and inventiveness to poetry, truth alone is appropriate to history.”
― Procopius of Caesarea

“So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods' bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aphrodite's thigh...
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supersede
While Grandmama in rockingchair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prothetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.”
― Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

“Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the starlit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Poems of W. B. Yeats Selected, edited, and introduced by William York Tindall

“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

“And everyone, men and women, seemed inordinately fond of hats.”
― Stephen Lawhead

“I have hated hypocrisy and deception all my life, yet all my life I have been victim to it. That is the terrible irony.”
― Michael Moorcock, Byzantium Endures

“The only thing that I am sure of is that we are mysteries to others, as much as to ourselves.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“I am alone as the pearl is alone in its shell. I have withdrawn into myself, but the sea – life hits me and forces me to open. It opens my womb, takes out my round pearl – soul, and strings it on a necklace. I cannot breathe under its weight. It holds all my dear, lost pearls...”
― Jasna Horvat

“If silence is a lie, then I have lied as well.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“I put together letters,
I formed words,
I spoke.”
― Jasna Horvat

“There was no doubt, the world is orbis quadratus, mundus quadratus, and its balance rests on the number four – a symbol of firmness, order and legality.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“In the square field of the game he has found the ground mirror of the circular plan of the heavenly sphere. Through play, he was becoming aware of the crux gemmata – the sign of Christ, and he created the letters of the Glagolitic script, and turned the trinitarian game into a tetragonic one. He had made the Glagolitic script, a game of four gospels in which the symbol of Christ’s name is placed. The Glagolitic is his game with three marbles – one for each of the messengers of the good news.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“There was He, there was She, they become It.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“I will return to the books... Constantine is right; books are more merciful towards each other than people.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“What would I wish for the one who is mine? I would wish him a good, knowledgeable sense, a resilient gut, and the capability for survival. Wrong... it is not enough just to survive... To the one who is mine, I would also wish faith that will renew and heal him from the pains of existence.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“You began the letter with the form of the cross, and the sound “A,” a symbol of a man and a Christian. With the first nine letters you said that it is good to live honorably in this world. Your signs are letters. Your letters are numbers. Your letters are also symbols.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“With symbols you have connected the two worlds, the visible and the invisible.”
― Jasna Horvat

“Your letters are birds. Caught in your net, stirred from their flight... Their wings are our written down speech. Landing and takeoff is conducted according to the rules. The rules you call grammar, but it is nothing other than geometry.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“I myself was passionate about games and contests... I wanted to be the first in translation, wandering and writing.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“They believed that the very name Croat comes from the word mountain (gora)... They were competing in the reading of the Bible and the chapters in which their name was mentioned: Isa 10, 29; Isa 10, 31; Ezek 27, 9; Ps 83, 8.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ

“Wild animals, that is what we are, John. You believe in man and his laws, and laws would not be necessary if we were not wild animals. Look at my cat, he does not attack you, even though you have desecrated his territory. We men, we are wild. Rabid and petulant... In a rabid dog too, one can see only – a short life.”
― Jasna Horvat, AZ