The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers – all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than […]
Places Quotes
Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth.
In North Carolina, it is winter on the Outer Banks. At this time of year you can walk nearly 100 miles down the wild barrier beaches without meeting another living soul. Hunch your back against the wind, put your hands in your pockets and ponder, as you walk, the mystery of the first Europeans to […]
To live and work in this kind of open country, with its hundred-mile views, is to lose the distinction between background and foreground. When I asked an older ranch hand to describe Wyoming’s openness, he said, ‘It’s all a bunch of nothing – wind and rattlesnakes – and so much of it you can’t tell […]
The main thing about Lima even today, is that it was the dominant Spanish city in South America for three hundred years. It still has the overtones of an imperial metropolis, and it still utterly dominates Peru, so much so that it is sometimes ironically called ‘a city searching for a country.’
The land was not the arctic waste commonly envisioned, but a fertile paradise; Puget Sound, said one rhapsodic report, was ‘the Mediterranean of the Northwest.’
We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.
Morocco is like a tree nourished by roots deep in the soil of Africa which breathes through foliage rustling to the winds of Europe. Yet Morocco’s existence is not only vertical. Horizontally it looks to the East, with which it is bound by ties of religion and culture. Even if we wished to sever those […]
Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever […]
To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.
