Giorgos Seferis

"I want no more than to speak simply to be granted that grace. Because we've loaded our songs with so much music that they're slowly sinking and we've decorated our art so much that its features have been eaten away by gold and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail. ...I think so much these days about the great river, that symbol which moves forward among herbs and greenery and beasts that graze and drink, and men who sow and harvest, great tombs even and small habitations of the dead. That current which goes its way and which is not so different from the blood of men..."

"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life."

"I awoke with this marble head in my hands which exhausts my elbows and I do not know where to set it down."

"A Levantine Nobel Prize laureate, Georgis Seferis, a Greek who lived for many years in Egypt, wrote: "And things that came later had the self-same/calmness which you see here,/they had this calmness because no soul/was left to us to think about,/none except the strength to carve some signs in stones/that touched now more deeply, beneath remembrance." Thus wrote Georgis Seferis, a true Levantine."

"The focal point of Greek-American cultural interest has definitely shifted in recent decades. Where formerly there was a somewhat affected and strained focus on classical Hellas, the contemporary awareness is much more in tune with the literature of modern Greece. This shift has almost been entirely due to the increasing availability of English translations of modern Greek writings, for not many American-born Greeks comfortably read novels or poetry in the original Greek. The beginnings of the new mood can be traced to the translations of the novels of Nikos Kazantzakis in the 1950s. These also stimulated interest in other Greek writers, notably the poets Constantine P. Cavafy, a product of the Greek diaspora in Alexandria, Egypt, and George Seferis, who won the Nobel literature prize in 1963."