Quotes from Zorba

A little bit about Zorba the Greek. It seems to be a book critiquing deconstructionalisms (kind of an oxymoron critiquing the idea of the critique). I think it is also pointing out the fact that Buddhism is no more intellectually sound than western ideas. I’m about half way through, I’ll put a second batch of quotes up sometime this summer.
Zorba the Greek (by Nikos Kazantzakis) Quotes:

“I stretched out my arm; I, too, felt like having a smoke. I took my pipe. I looked at it with emotion. It was a big and precious one, “Made in England.” It was a present from my friend- the one who had geyish-green eyes and slender fingers. That was abroad, years ago. He had finished his studies and was leaving that evening for Greece. “Give up cigarettes,” he said. “You light one, you smoke half of it and throw the rest away. Your love only lasts a minute. It’s disgraceful. You’d better take up a pipe. It’s like a faithful spouse. When you go home, it’ll be there, quietly waiting for you. You’ll light it, you’ll watch the smoke rising in the air and you’ll think of me!”

“Young people are cruel beasts, they’re inhuman, they don’t understand.”

“No. Love may be the most intense joy on earth. It may be. But, now I see that bronze hand, I want to escape.”

“I endeavored to lead a different type of life, to interest myself in practical work, to know and love the human material which had fallen into my hands, to feel the long-wished-for joy of no longer having to deal with words but with living men.”

“When the boss is hard, the men respect him, they work. When the boss is soft, they leave it all to him, and have an easy time. Get it?”

“What were we saying the day before yesterday, boss? You were saying you wanted to open the people’s eyes. All right, you just go and open old uncle Anagnosti’s eyes for him! You saw his wife had to behave before him, waiting for his orders, like a dog begging. Just go now and teach them that women have equal rights with men, and that it’s cruel to eat a piece of the pig while the pig’s still raw and groaning in front of you, and that it’s simply lunacy to give thanks to God because he’s got everything while you’re starving to death! What good’ll that poor devil Anagnosti get out of all your explanatory humbug? You’d only cause him a lot of bother. And what’d old mother Anagnosti get out of it? The fat would be in the fire: family rows would start, the hen would want to be cock, the couple would just have a good set-to and make their feathers fly…! Let people be, boss; don’t open their eyes. And supposing you did, what’d they see? Their misery! L:eave their eyes closed, boss, and let them go on dreaming!”

“We educated people are just empty headed birds of the air.”

“I was happy, I knew that . While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize—sometimes with astonishment—how happy we had been. But on this Cretan coast I was experiencing happiness and knew I was happy.”

“I’m white on top already, boss, and my teeth are getting loose. I’ve no time to lose. You’re young, you can still afford to be patient. I can’t. But I do declare, the older I get the wilder I become! Don’t let anyone tell me old age steadies a man! Nor that when he sees death coming he stretches out his neck and says: Cut off my head, please, so that I can go to heaven! The longer I live, the more I rebel. I’m not going to give in; I want t o conquer the world.”

“Live is trouble,” Zorba continued. “Death, no. To live—do you know what I mean? To undo your belt and look for trouble!”

“I still said nothing. I knew Zorba was right, I knew it, but I di not dare. My life had got on the wrong track, and my contract with men had become now a mere soliloquy. I had fallen so low that, if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book.”

“This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them.”

“In religions which have lost their creative spark, the gods eventually become no more than poetic motifs or ornaments for decorating human solitude and walls.”

“All these things which had formerly so fascinated me appeared this morning to be no more than cerebral acrobatics and refined charlatanism! That is how it always is at the decline of a civilization. That is how man’s anguish ends—in masterly conjuring tricks: pure poetry, pure music, pure thought. The last man—who had freed himself from all belief, from all illusions and had nothing more to expect or to fear—sees the clay of which he is made reduced to spirit, and this spirit has no soil left for its roots, from which to draw its sap. The last man has emptied himself; no more seed, no more excrement, no more blood. Everything having turned into words, every set of words into musical jugglery, the last man goes even further: he sits in hs utter solitude and decomposes the music into mute, mathematical equations.”

“You’re young,” he said smiling at me; “don’t listen to the old. If the world did heed them, it would rush headlong to its destruction. If a widow crosses your path, get hold of her! Get married, have children, don’t hesitate! Troubles were made for young men!”

“As a child, then, I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word “eternity,” and its quite number of other words too—“love” “hope” “country” “God.” As each word was conquered and left behind, I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress. But no, I was only changing words and calling it deliverance. And there I had been, for the last two years, hanging over the edge of the word “Buddha.”